The chairman of a parliamentary session opens a meeting by declaring it closed. Freud interpreters such error as revealing a person’s mixed emotions. My experience on slips of the tongue is quite similar to the chairman. In the first meeting with the important person my response to his “welcome” is exactly the same word “welcome”. Even though my answer should have been most probably ”thank you” my tongue produced the sounds inappropriate to this situation. Personally I sympathize with Freud’s idea of mixed emotions because in that moment I felt excited, nervous and confused.
Sherry Turkle argues that the mind is computer. She explains “open” and “closed” are designed by the same symbols, separated by sign for opposition. ”Closed” equals “minus open” in the chairman’s case, but I just wander – what is the “minus of welcome”?
Just the highlighted lines in the text:
What the computer is doing for us and what it is doing to us.

  • We are learning new ways to think about what it means know and understand.
  • The contested terrain is a field of struggle between competing definitions of benefits and restrictions of changes in thinking.
  • Thinking about privacy
  • Save space the personal experimentation that is so crucial for adolescent development (avatar or a self)
  • In expressing multiple aspects of self may find it harder to develop authentic selves.
  • Information technology has made it possible to have the illusion of companionship without the demands of friendship.
  • It is possible to manipulate text on a computer screen and see now it looks faster than we can think about what the words mean. (Word processing vs thinking)
  • Can make dedicated students into better writers.
  • Can make bad writers even worse.
  • Taking things at interface value – when people say that something is transparent, they mean that they can see how to make it work, not that they know how it works.
  • Computer environment puts users in worlds based on constrained choices. In computer word you experience life as a reassuring dichotomy of scary and safe.
    Good sentences
    We live in a culture of simulation.
    The idea of thinking ahead has become exotic.
    Might be useful
    The journalist’s traditional questions: who, what, when, where, why, and how.

1. who wrote these words?

2. what is their message?

3. why were they written?

4. how are they situated in time and place, politically and socially?