D2: Psych class notes

Designing a memex

The take-home final for Psychology 311a involves designing and beginning to build your own memex. Here's a summary of what I have in mind: Plan yourself a memex, create (or at least design in some detail) your own blog, and put a CV and one other page of your memex there. We’ll spend about half our remaining class time discussing our progress on these, and the rest on constructing a rudimentary ego psychology with which to describe and study such work. I’ll hold office hours as needed to work with each of you on your project.

Things to consider including in your memex:
• The relation of this class to your memex project
• An explanation of the design of the front page of your memex
• Pictures, film clips, old receipts, contracts, fiction, drafts of fiction, audio memos …
• Links to library resources
• Links to others’ memexs
• Memory/navigation aids for your future self
• A place to put all this.

As part of preparing you for this project, I wish to review psychoanalytic "ego psychology" in light of PCs, the Net, and the blogosphere.

As we start this discussion, I'd like to make an important philosophy of science point about psychoanalytic ego psychology (and most of personality theory generally). Its content, its critical terminology, is all metaphor: it’s made up, it’s not real. Terms like “libido,” “need,” “anxiety,” “Id,” “Ego,” are used metaphorically in our discourse. Thus we say, “It’s as if there were a part of his self that functions autonomously and determines how he directs his attention, organizes his thoughts, and accesses his memory. This sort of writing – and of thinking – turns out to be fine for some kinds of Psychology and most of the “humanistic” disciplines. We can do serious work on, say, the personality factors and issues that most impact the extent and type of folks’ use of personal computer and the Internet without assuming that our subjects’ “Extraversion” is an entity that can be measured by a self-report test and expressed as a number. From here on out, this is a class about using the language of personality descripton, with respect to ourselves, in a way that can be understood by others. Your mid-term projects gave you some experience with this. For example, what vocabulary, and what background knowledge, is required to adequately describe
• Your suite-mate’s 30 hour a week EQ habit?
• Your own fascination with [favorite actor/author]?
• Your semester-abroad friendship with ___, from ___?
We can be helped in talking about such matters by ego-psychological concepts if we do not reify or scientize these.

For Monday

I want us to get ready to think about gender-bending in CMC -- role-playing, chat, whatever -- by

reading Amy Bruckman's (1993) "Gender-swapping on the Internet" and her (1996) "Finding One's Own in Cyberspace"

browsing a couple of the other links from the online links bibliography at Fragment.nl, then

discussing CMC gender-bending with a friend who's done it, and/or trying it ourselves.

If you want to get out ahead of next Wednesday's discussion, read also Thomas H. Ogden's A NEW READING OF THE ORIGINS OF OBJECT-RELATIONS THEORY (on-campus access) and start thinking how one's "object"-relations history affects their role-playing, self-construing, activity in cyberspace. And after that, there's "The Performance of Cyberspace: An Exploration Into Computer-Mediated Reality," by Gretchen Barbatsis, Michael Fegan, and Kenneth Hansen.

Jung

It's time, in Psych 311a, for Jung. Here are the resources I used last Spring in Intro, plus Jung's own (1921) description of The Psychological Types. There are two linked versions of my Intro lecture on Jung, of which you might try one if this is all new to you.

The lecture ('02)

D2 Freud and Jung

Intro'/Extraversion

Anima/Animus

Jung's Dream

A case study in "Individuation"
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Notes on Adler and Jung (Spencer)

Marc Fonda Jung site

Jung Web resources

Jung's own (1921) description of The Psychological Types
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I'm looking for convenient, interesting, and free versions of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator and related Jungian typing tools. Several are linked along with articles and other resources at The Enneagram and the MBTI - an Electronic Journal

There is interesting background information at The Fundamental Nature of the MBTI

A straightforward explanation of the types and opportunity to select one's four-letter code is available at PersonalityPathways.
The Kiersey Temperament Sort, formerly free, now seems to provide only a basic score and to sell the profile. Other suggestins welcome.
My ususal type, BTW, is INFP, and these websites offer me lots of advice about what this means.
So, what's your type? Did you learn something from the description? How stable do you think your type will be across days, months, years?
Could we infer one's type from the content of their IM logs, RPG logs, weblogs?

P311: The mid-term project

Originally I thought I'd ask each seminar member to pick an idea from Turkle, to find someone who illustrates it, and to study them. By today I realized that was backwards. Here's the (draft 2) assignment: Either
1. Pick someone whose use of (and involvement with) a personal information system intrigues you, talk to them about it, watch them do it, and report on it in light of some point in Turkle's book; or
2. Get yourself into an on-line setting (MUD, MMORPG, AIM, ...) in which you can "meet" and interview one or more participants and share in some of their experience by "watching" them act and interact in the virtual setting.

The main goal of this exercise is to get us out of the "zoo patron" role described in class today, to force us to acknowledge that some folks care deeply about what they do with PCs and online and that we need to understand them on their own terms. When these projects are done we'll have some real examples to discuss as we continue to read about specific computer-mediated activities. Then perhaps we can begin to imagine what a personality theory that accounted for cyberbehavior would look like. Some specific questions to frame these interviews are included in the course FAQ.

I'd like a one-page prospectus (a statement about whom you plan to interview/observe, and why; or what sort of person you'd like to interview/observe); or what setting(s) you plan to explore. If nothing comes to mind, let's try to talk either Friday AM or early next week. I want to spend some class time comparing and helping with each other's projects, and I want you to have time to write up the results in half a dozen pages by Friday, October 24 (the Friday after Fall Break).

Then we'll interview each other in class about what we learned of our "subjects." Maybe a couple of them would even join our class for a discussion, or for show 'n' tell ...

I'll post this description of the assignment to the P311 syllabus, and I'll revise in light of questions or comments posted here.

The Clinical and Statistical Prediction of Terrorism

My working topic for the 9/26 meeting of the Senior Seminar is "The Clinical and Statistical Prediction of Terrorism." I have emailed each seminar member Chapter 6 ("Descriptive Theory of Probability Judgment") from Jonathan Baron's Thinking and Deciding (3rd Ed.) in PDF format. You may print this or read it in the Adobe Reader (I suggest you upgrade to v. 6, which has searching and improved formatting for reading on-screen). My copy will be on the top right shelf in the Psych Lounge (along with a shelf of recent books on personal computing and the Internet), should you want to read the chapter (or browse other chapters) there.

I suggest you first read and explore these links in the order given:

Salon.com Technology | Is Big Brother our only hope against bin Laden?

Terrorism Information Awareness Systems

Evidence Extraction and Link Discovery

Washington Post: The Plot: A web of connections

You are welcome to comment here, as an alternative to sending me your suggested discussion question(s) by email.

Chatbots and the Turing test

My friend Bryan responded to my request for pointers to talk-bots with a wonderful "bookmarqs" page. Here are some lighlights from one of its links:

A.L.I.C.E. is a chat bot.

The BotSpot has links to around fifty (50) bots.

ELIZA is one of the oldest AL/AI experiments. Try this emulator.

Zoe, a chat bot from Melanie McGee.

Turkle: Aspects of the Self

In Chapter 6, "Aspects of the Self" (p. 178), Turkle gets to the vexed issue of the "ego" in psychoanalytic theory:

One of Freud's most revolutionary contributions was proposing a radically decentered view of the self, but this message was often obscured by some of his followers who tended to give the ego greater executive authority in the management of the self. However, this recentralizing move was itself periodically challenged from within the psychoanalytic movement. Jungian ideas stressed that the self is a meeting place of diverse archetypes. Object relations theory talked about how the things and people of the world come to live inside us. More recently, post-structuralist thinkers have attemped an even more radical decentering of the ego. In the work of Jacques Lacan, for example, the complex chains of associations that constitute meaning for each individual lead to no final endpoint or core self.

D2: This constantly re-constructed self, sampling from many component bits of biographical drama played through neurotic styles and defense mechanisms, is what plays out and discovers itself, IMO, in blogs, chat, and gaming.

Turkle's work is our bridge between Freud and Web. She discussed these issues down the road in 1997:
Change Your Virtual Identity and Discover Your Real Self (From the UPenn Gazetteer)

During a library-sponsored symposium about the Internet titled "What's Playing on the Celestial Jukebox: Real Knowledge in a Virtual World," moderator Terry Gross, host of the nationally syndicated radio show Fresh Air, asked panelist Sherry Turkle to talk about some of her experiences in the world of MUDs: Multi-User Domains. Turkle, professor of the sociology of science at MIT and the author of Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet, began by describing what the symposium itself, held in November, would be like if it were taking place in a MUD instead of a basement auditorium in Meyerson Hall.

...

As a student at Harvard University, Turkle recalled, she studied with psychologist Erik Erikson, who "used to write about adolescence as a time of moratorium, a time of 'time out,' " one often associated with the college years. "You had a chance to experiment with these many aspects of self -- to have a kind of consequence-free time, and he wrote about how important that was in the development of a healthy identity."

Justin!

I asked the class, who are reading the first two chapters of Turkle's book, to spend half an hour browsing www.links.net. I started doing so last night, and got to Justin's Chandra page when my wireless DSL connection disappeared. I started there this morning, and spent three-quarters of an hour meandering from Justin's old girlfriends (and former friends) to his drug experiences and reflections, to Francis Parker, to Kurt Vonnegut, to his "Why the web?" page.
What do dream-troubled Victorian Freud and Web-obsessed millennial Justin really have in common? There is, obviously, a preoccupation with oneself -- a mostly-unquestioned conviction that one's own experiences are interesting, worth exploring, worthy of being written edited and re-examined.
I loved a student's comment a few years ago, in response to a midterm assignment that students use some of Justin's postings to discuss Erikson's epigenetic theory, that Justin's pages are not simply an illustration of the functioning of his ego but rather a part of it. Where it was, he came to be. Justin has lots of company, now that (at least) hundreds of thousands of people sit daily at a keyboard (or perhaps at a screen on which spoken words appear) and spell out accounts of their daily life, their social networks, their political views, their personal issues. Consider the Iraqi and American bloggers of Baghdad, the LiveJournal folk, the Xanga kids. My own list of blogger friends is growing just these last couple of months, and it is tempting to spend more time structuring my own three blogs and incorporating material from my diary and Web pages into them.
This is a time-consuming business, to be sure, and I am constantly reminded that to be so reflective may mean to live less, to be less than fully absorbed in each day's activities. What sorts of people have elected to do this over the years? What sorts will?

The "royal road"

Thanks to the Classics in the History of Psychology web resource, we have easy access to Freud's first attempt to describe his work for a general audience, the lecture delivered at Clark University in 1909. This is an excellent short overview of the theory developed in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900).
Dreams are discussed in Lecture 3:

Interpretation of dreams is in fact the via regia to the interpretation of the unconscious, the surest ground of psychoanalysis and a field in which every worker must win his convictions and gain his education. If I were asked how one could become a psychoanalist [sic], I should answer, through the study of his own dreams. With great tact all opponents of the psychoanalytic theory have so far either evaded any criticism of the "Traumdeutung" or have attempted to pass over it with the most superficial objections. If, on the contrary, you will undertake the solution of the problems of dream life, the novelties which psychoanalysis present to your thoughts will no longer be difficulties.

Do our attempts to understand our own or others' dreams by Freud's methods bear out Freud's claim that we will thereby become sympathetic to Freud's other theories, or to psychoanalysis as practice?

Freud, Sigmund (1910). The Origin and Development of Psychoanalysis. First published in American Journal of Psychology, 21, 181-218.

The Gold Bug Variations

I thought I'd provide some background for my digression today re Richard Powers, an author with whom I am much taken these past two years (since Jon Schull recommended Plowing the Dark).
I'm about to finish Powers' The Gold Bug Variations (1991), an immensely complex and satisfying novel I've been reading slowly all summer.
Edgar Allan Poe's "The Gold Bug" suggests the puzzle-solving aspect of the plot, as Bach's "Goldberg Variations" provide the set of chapter titles and a recurrent gloss on Dr. Stuart Ressler's career as failed bio-genetics researcher and deep thinker about genomes, love, and patterns. It's useful to have links to both handy as you read.
Back in August (while I was in Minnesota) I found a Salon interview with Richard Powers, and it might help you decide if you want to read him.
Found a Salon interview with Richard Powers:

I was born in Chicago, moved away to Bangkok at the age of 11, came back to the United States at 16, finished high school in a rural Illinois town, went to college in a rural Illinois town, moved to Boston, moved back to a rural Illinois town, moved to the Netherlands, lived for many years there, moved back to a rural Illinois town. The Midwest is such a tabula rasa. Turning the prairie into agribiz is the apotheosis of this drive for control and mastery and efficiency that describes what we are. My books are not Midwestern in the sense that they plumb the Midwestern psyche in the way that Southern writers get to a real precise regional sense of their culture. Or New Yorkers do for their culture. Or the western does for another whole American narrative. I don't know what the Midwestern narrative is really. It's definitely diffident, it's definitely deferential, it's definitely Protestant, it's definitely a great believer in progress, it's maybe the last bastion of enlightenment, misguided enlightenment thought. I don't know. But it's also -- I know it feels exotic to you, it just feels like a baseline to me.
. . .
The Midwest is useful to me for a lot of reasons. One is that it does seem the apotheosis of normative bourgeoisie behavior to me. And that's very useful. Make yourself invisible, don't break the rules and all will be well. And of course, that's subverted and played off against in a couple of my books. It's useful to me as a kind of Everyman setting. There is that sense of omnipotential, unwritten, blank page to it.

Each of the three Powers novels I've read -- Plowing the Dark, Galatea 2.2, and The Goldbug Variations -- has moved and fascinated me.