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IF you ever want to go to a place where people talk about abstract, scientific concepts over coffee in caf茅s, go to Cambridge, Massachusetts. If, on the other hand, you want to go somewhere to find out what these people are like, the new generation of blinking undergraduates for whom life on their computer screens is more real than the daylight world outside their university walls 鈥� go to Cambridge, Massachusetts.

It鈥檚 in that world that Sherry Turkle, professor of the sociology of science at MIT and a licensed clinical psychologist, set forth to study who people are when large chunks of their lives are happening in cyberspace. In Life on the Screen, she quotes a user referring to the windows on his computer screen which include multiuser games, e-mail from friends, and his homework: 鈥淩L [real life] is just one more window, and it鈥檚 usually not my best one.鈥� Just as society has become more fragmented, so has the individual, who may assume different identities on different systems. Turkle got a shock when she found a character called Dr Sherry in a MUD (a multiuser domain, a collaborative, text-based world defined by its users). The character was, 鈥渁 derivative of me, but not mine鈥�.

Much of Turkle鈥檚 analysis revolves around the two main currents she sees in our relationships with computers. One example is the disparity between the Mac world and the PC world. Most Mac users don鈥檛 get past the graphical interface and spend their computing lives dealing with a simulation. PC users can reach down 鈥渋nto鈥� the computer and control it directly by entering commands.

Yet, simulations are limited by the assumptions made by the people who program them. This, along with many interviews with MUD players and much close reasoning and analysis, is all part of a central question: do simulations devalue real life? Underlying every simulation are neat, predictable rules -understand them and you can manipulate the simulation. If you make a mistake, you start again. Life has no such convenient safeguards. And yet, a moratorium on consequences can have value for some people, by giving them a safe environment in which to work through their problems. For some, virtual worlds are a place to find a reality less limited than their own. For others, they are a road to self-knowledge. But for our society these worlds and their impact on real life pose a challenge we need to understand.