In the early days of the computer age, while her colleagues were building faster microchips and experimenting with artificial intelligence, M.I.T. professor Sherry Turkle was asking what the tech revolution meant for the people caught up in it. In her book "The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit," she explored such questions as whether hackers were victims of stunted emotional development. In "Life on the Screen," she pondered whether a sexual assault of one player by another in an online game is in any way a "real" rape.

Turkle, a sociology professor, is a leading expert on the folkways of what she calls our newly emergent "culture of simulation." Her origins are decidedly nontech; the Brooklyn-born Turkle started out studying French philosophy (and working as a live-in housekeeper) in Paris. Her early writings focused on how people used psychoanalytic concepts to forge their identities. But when she arrived at M.I.T. to teach, she found herself in a world in which people turned to computers, not Freud, as personal reference points..