Sherry Turkle uses the terms 'instrumental technology' and 'subjective technology' in her authors lecture on her new book 'The Inner History of Devices' (2008) to discuss the relationship we have to objects. 'Instrumental technology' describes what the technology is used for and what it does for us. A cellphone in one instance is a device that allows us to contact other people by calling them.
'Subjective technology,' meanwhile, is the term used to describe what the technology does to us. How it might change our perception of ourselves and our idea of how we fit into our environment or community.
Turkle does not limit technology to objects like cellphones or computers, they might be spectacles, a pencil, a toy with a long colorful tail. However in Turkle's view they become an extension of self by understanding them as 'subjective technology's' rather then just an instrumental device.
As Sherrie Turkle comes from a psychoanalytic or psychodynamic tradition of thinking, it is worth clarifying a few more ideas. In her lecture Turkle unpacks what she understands an object to be, this is particularly relevant because she uses this term to define objects of technology.
Within a psychoanalytic/psychodynamic frame an 'object' is the word that psychoanalysts use to talk about people. We bring people to live inside us as people 'objects'. An agenda that Turkle has in this book is to elevate the study of object 'objects' to afford the same degree of nuance that is used in the critical discussion of people.
Though a personal investment into (or use of), an object the object becomes a technology that can be applied with the idea of having a subjective and and instrumental component to it. Turkle talks about a student she taught at MIT talking about her computer. "When you use a computer," the student is quoted as saying, "you put a little piece of your mind into the computers mind and you come to see it differently." (0.08.28 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/634).
The relationship of people to computers is a subject that Turkle has written a substantial amount on, her book 'Life on the Screen; Identity in the Age of the Internet' (1995) Turkle talks about the use of computers to communicate with other people, social networks, and the effect of virtual spaces on the connections between individuals and/or machines.
The way Turkle discusses the use of objects is interesting to me because of the way she understands the relationships between technology, objects and people. Objects of technology can be almost anything, so I can expand this to talk about conceptual objects.
By a conceptual object I am talking about a technology that can be activated through another technology, such as a computer or by using language. An avatar is a conceptual object, and object that is defined as something that represents or stands in for a user of a virtual space.
If we look at the way Turkle applies the terms 'subjective' and 'instrumental' to describe the relationship an object of technology to a person we can begin to unpack an Avatar in a slightly different way. Certainly an Avatar has an instrumental use, so it follows that this conceptual object must have a subjective effect also. And as an instrumental technology through our use of these objects it becomes something we invest ourselves into.
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