Notes: Sherry Turkle (2007) Evocative objects: things we think with.

p. 307-309

“Objects help us make our minds”

• idea of bricolage by Levi-Strauss
• Jean Piaget: objects help us think about such things as number, space, time, causality, and Piaget reminds us that our learning is situated, concrete, and personal.
• Object play—for adults as well as children—engages the heart as well as the mind; objects infuse learning with libido.

p. 310-311

About organization of time

• The organizer is one of many day-today technologies that concretize our modern notion of
  time.
• Our clocks and datebooks do more than keep uson time. Objects function to bring society within the self.
• The historian Michel Foucault provides a framework for thinking about how objects such as Hlubinka’s watch and datebook serve as foundations of “disciplinary society.”
• Roland Barthes writes that the objects of disciplinary society come to seem natural –> what seems natural comes to seem right
• Contemporary regimes of power have become capillary, in the sense that power is embodied in widely distributed institutions and objects.

p. 320

Freud analyzes the
etymology of the German words heimlich and unheimlich, roughly the homelike and familiar and the eerie and
strange. The two words seem to be the opposite of each
other, suggesting that the eerie is that which is most unfamiliar. But among the meanings of heimlich (familiar)
is a definition close to its opposite: it can mean concealed or kept out of sight. Heimlich has a “double.” By
extension, Freud argues, our most eerie experiences
come not from the exotic, but from what is close to
home. Uncanny objects take emotional disorientation
and turn it into philosophical grist for the mill.

p. 321

we tend to present “front room” knowledge as “true.” But
its certainties are constructed. We make up a clean
story to mask our anxieties about the chaotic state of
the little that we know. Chaos compels its opposite: “the
orderly presentation of supposed facts”

Societies create the classification “dirt” to designate objects that don’t fit neatly into their ways of ordering of the world

Evelyn Fox Keller’s reflections on her life in science, a narrative about the
power of order-disrupting (“dirty”) objects to provoke meditation and new vision.

p. 323-326

I have discussed physical objects that engender intimacy. What becomes of this intimacy when people work with digital objects?