Week 5: Information & Materiality
Computers tease us into believing that we can live separately from our bodies, that we can engage in a virtual world and ?be free? from our own meat, and yet, at the same time, they cruely pull the rug out from beneath us by forcing us to realize that every stimulation felt is one felt in the body that we simply cannot escape. This interplay of the desire for the thinking self to escape the body juxtaposed with the inability for any information to exist outside of a medium is the axis of Hayles? exploration. She states, ?The great dream and promise of information is that it can be free from the material constraints... If we can become the information we have constructed, we, too, can soar free, immortal like the gods? it can be a shock to remember that for information to exist, it must always be instantiated in a medium? (75).
I couldn?t help but connect Hayles discussion of the dream of soaring free like the gods to other historical expressions of a desire to move beyond the body. I am thinking now of Shakespeare?s dream for immortality enacted through his writings, a way for him (or his lover) to continue to exist in information. I am thinking of Judeo-Christian religious longings for ?a soul? to be free from the body. Although Shakespeare?s immortality and Judeo-Christian eternality are obviously very different kinds of desires for a continued existence, they are connected in that they both grapple with the reality of death, the loss of the material body, and hope to find some other means of being. So I found Hayles discussion of proprioceptive illusion to be apt insofar as the feeling that the computer becomes an extension of the body ?has a physiological basis? (88), but I think there is also a psychological basis that is ingrained in human beings to long for a continued existence. Whether this psychological longing is the desire to avoid death or the desire to continue life, the longing, now expressed to some extent through computers, may build upon or encourage the psychological effect of proprioceptivity. In other words, I am proposing that this physiological effect is strong toward producing disembodiment feelings for psychological reasons; and it is the very thing, perhaps, that both fools people into believing that the mind/body split is real (believing that the thinking self can somehow be extracted from the meat) as well as the very thing that subverts that belief as the feeling is itself found to be physiological.
Perhaps a nice juxtaposition with Hayles recognition that ?it is a historical construction to believe that computer media are disembodying technologies? (93), is Lupton?s recognition that computers contain ?a degree of anthropomorphism that is found in few other technologies? (478), so much so that ?the central utopian discourse around computer technology is the potential offered for humans to escape the body? (479). However, Lupton?s discussion does not center on the historical construction of disembodiment as Hayles? article does; rather, Lupton unpacks how human-computer interaction connects to the masculine mythos of control and penetration and the feminine mythos of security and maternality and suggests that our PCs take on a life of their own and reflect our relationships between lovers or friends, and reflect ourselves. I enjoyed her flamboyant and literary discussion of the computer, and I think her article reflects a shift from the conceptualizations of computers in Wiener?s time. The shift I am referring to is the shift from computers as rational, thinking devices with a cold and calculating metaphor to computers as warm and friendly devices with relational inter-beingness as the overarching metaphor. This conceptual shift from rationality to emotionality here is natural, I suppose, as computers become more connected to our daily routines and more a part of our lives?so they become more like us, and we become more like them.
On a somewhat different note, I think that Wiener?s recognition that machines could, if properly designed and coded, operate (or ?think?) more efficiently and more accurately than human beings in disaster situations is quite silly. Any event in any given context or situation (especially disaster events) will have a variety of fluid and often unpredictable variables so that the human, no matter how emotional he or she may get, will be more adept at identifying such variables and, therefore, to making decisions that reflect an adaptation to such variables. Because variables cannot be predicted or formulated in advance, the machine cannot be programmed effectively. So on this count, Wiener is way off. However, his observation/warning that humans should not bow to the machine god is probably a good one, because as we move forward (I am speaking metaphorically here) and as we are then unable to turn to the side and see what we left behind, we may not know how that which is not within our sphere of vision is affecting us and changing us, since, of course, we are focused only on what is right ahead. As David Wills says in his new book, Dorsality, we preference the frontal as we talk about moving forward and as we value ?progress,? and, in doing so, we sometimes lose track of the shaping forces of history that are still affecting us but lay out of view. And the articles we read this week were useful to thinking about how the history of the computer and human-computer interaction affects current ways of thinking about computers as we move forward with little history in view.
So the discussion by Hobart and Schiffman of the evolution of the computing machine reminds us that historical developments of technologies do lead to overall changes in a thing itself. The entire article, in its long exploration of Turing?s and von Neumann?s contributions to computing machines, was to drive this point home and to show how the computer is a historical manifestation but also an entirely new thing that has emerged from subtle changes and new additions. The discussion, therefore, of Turing and von Neumann is pertinent since both of these men realized that organizing simplistic mechanisms could result in complex calculations; as they say? ?from digital bits does information beget itself? (204). And just as information is begotten from digital bits, and thereby changed slowly by the addition or subtraction of digital bits, so I think is humanity changed as well. Hence, I find Hobart?s and Schiffman?s mention of Hegel on page 212 to be useful toward thinking about what it could one day mean to be human as we slowly engage in technology and add technologies to our thinking and to our everyday operation. ?German philosopher Hegel believed that changes in quantity eventually transform quality, that enough change in degree produces change in kind.?