Simulation and Its Discontents by Sherry Turkle

Simulation and Its Discontents by Sherry Turkle

How the simulation and visualization technologies so pervasive in science, engineering, and design have changed our way of seeing the world.

Over the past twenty years, the technologies of simulation and visualization have changed our ways of looking at the world. In Simulation and Its Discontents, Sherry Turkle examines the now dominant medium of our working lives and finds that simulation has become its own sensibility. We hear it in Turkle's description of architecture students who no longer design with a pencil, of science and engineering students who admit that computer models seem more real than experiments in physical laboratories.

Echoing architect Louis Kahn's famous question, What does a brick want?, Turkle asks, What does simulation want? Simulations want, even demand, immersion, and the benefits are clear. Architects create buildings unimaginable before virtual design; scientists determine the structure of molecules by manipulating them in virtual space; physicians practice anatomy on digitized humans. But immersed in simulation, we are vulnerable. There are losses as well as gains. Older scientists describe a younger generation as drunk with code. Young scientists, engineers, and designers, full citizens of the virtual, scramble to capture their mentors' tacit knowledge of buildings and bodies. From both sides of a generational divide, there is anxiety that in simulation, something important is slipping away. Turkle's examination of simulation over the past twenty years is followed by four in-depth investigations of contemporary simulation culture: space exploration, oceanography, architecture, and biology.

She is the author of The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit (MIT Press, twentieth anniversary edition), Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet, and Psychoanalytic Politics: Jacques Lacan and Freud's French Revolution, among other books. She is the editor of three MIT Press books: Evocative Items: Things We Think With, Falling for Science: Objects in Mind, and The Inner History of Electronics. Anita Say Chan is an Assistant Research Professor of Communications in the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign's College of Media's Department of Media and Cinema Studies and the Institute of Communications Research.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780262012706
ISBN 10	0262012707
Title	Simulation and Its Discontents
Author	Sherry Turkle
Series	Simplicity: Design Technology Business Life
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	MIT Press Ltd
Year published	2009-04-17
Number of pages	232
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.