"The imperative to self-knowledge has always been at the heart of philosophical inquiry," wrote MIT professor Sherry Turkle in the insightful book about the web and the self, Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet. Published in 1995 as the second part of a trilogy that examined our relationships with technology, it looked at how we are who we are in online spaces. And what that means for us offline.
The good news is that the results are positive: "Play has always been an important aspect of our individual efforts to build identity," she said, referencing developmental psychologist Erik Erikson, and nodding to the theories of psychoanalysts Freud, Lacan and Jung. "In terms of our views of the self," she wrote, "new images of multiplicity, heterogeneity, flexibility, and fragmentation dominate current thinking about human identity. "
At the time Life on the Screen was released, most of the visitors were college students and their professors from a remarkably small talent pool, and a surprisingly small geography. They were tech-savvy, and generically open-minded about the new fields of virtual exploration that lay within the networks of this new communication platform. They were, in other words, liberal, enlightened types who were more willing to embrace the unprecedented fluidity of self-expression that this new technology uniquely afforded.
As a psychoanalyst and a web user herself, Turkle spent much of the book explaining why the articulation of multiple personalities wasn’t pathological. Contrary to its Latin root, identity need not mean "the same", she argued. "No one aspect can be claimed as the absolute, true self", she wrote, maintaining that the web allowed us the opportunity to get to know our "inner diversity". In the great psychoanalytic tradition, she said that self-actualisation meant coming to terms with who we are, and integrating each aspect of it into a coherent and well-integrated us.
Almost everyone has experienced this kind of identity play. Even if you’ve never ventured into an online game or been a signed-up member of a web community, you’ve probably developed a profile for a social network, written a blog, styled a website, commented on an article. But things are different from the time when Turkle was writing Life on the Screen. Nowadays, our virtual social lives are increasingly integrated. with our offline social lives. The freedom of expression is curtailed by the threat of offline consequences from online actions. Today, your reputation offline is far more closely tied to your reputation online than before. In fact, our experience of contemporary identity online is disarmingly similar to offline.
However, I still subscribe to the old Turkle. Consequence-free online environments allow us to practise and play without fear of offline effect, and offer an extraordinary place to experience the fluidity of our selves: I can be anyone, even a dog. As Tom MacMaster found, there still are places online where this is possible.
The text is most likely to be（）
A. a scientific report
B. a review of a book
C. a description of a new phenomenon
D. an account of a personal experience
参考答案：B
解析：
本文是一篇书评。第一段提到了Turkle的书《屏幕上的生活：网络时代的身份》，第二段之后介绍了书中的内容和书的作者的基本观点。但是，本文作者也指出，在网上和网下身份的问题上，现在的状况与Turkle写书的时代已经不同了。在现代社会中，人们不再有自由——自由在这里指网上做的事情不会对网下的生活产生影响，因为网上和网下生活紧密相连，这使得我们变得谨慎起来。作者在最后一段又回到Turkle的书，作者说他希望回到Turkle的书所描绘的那个时代，因为在那个时代里人们可以更充分地享受consequence-free online environment，想成为谁就成为谁。综观全文，本文更多地是评价了Turkle的书，表示了对这本书的认同。