Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet
In this 1995 book, Sherry Turkle turned to the early internet — bulletin boards, chat rooms, and text-based virtual worlds known as MUDs — to examine how people, including many teenagers, experimented with multiple online identities distinct from their offline selves. She described this as evidence that digital life was reshaping how people understood a stable, singular sense of self, replacing it with something more fluid and 'decentered.' The book helped popularize the idea that the internet is a social and psychological environment, not just a tool, and that spending significant time in it is associated with changes in how young people build and present identity. TechKids Foundation includes it as an early, influential account of how online spaces shape adolescent identity formation, written well before social media as it exists today.
Turkle, Sherry. Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet. Simon & Schuster, 1995.