Week 5
I think Hayles? article was one of the most interesting articles I have read so far in this class. Her discussion of the virtual as ?the cultural perception that material objects are interpenetrated by information pattern? (69), made a lot of sense to me. I was especially drawn to her discussion of the material-information relationship. I think modern society has a serious problem when it comes to separating final product from process. We tend to forget that work goes into everything we have, just like every bit of information has to be conveyed using material means even if we can?t see those means.
The divide between product and process (or information and material) plays out in multiple literary examples, from Ayn Rand?s Galt?s Gulch in Atlas Shrugged to Jose Saramago?s anonymous South American city ravaged by blindness in Blindness. These two novels show what happen when societies take the final product for granted, ignoring the material goods and human ingenuity that go into even the most basic human tasks. You can also look to history for examples: the Spanish inquisition expelled the Jewish people. The Jewish people were the nation?s banking class; consequently, the Spanish markets then failed. Zimbabwe expelled the white farmers and the nation starved.
What does any of this have to do with Hayles? Well, I see interesting correlations between our false divide between information-material and the current network neutrality debate. I am as big a fan of Lessig as the next guy, and my Wiki post this week is making fun of Ted Stevens, but some of the stuff I read in defense of network neutrality falls into the trap Hayles identifies: the false divide between information and materiality. Information means very little without the material (in this case, vast expanses of telecom networks I don?t understand) to transport it. That material costs money to build and money to maintain. Some of that material is publicly owned; some of it is privately owned. The point remains though, it is material. This is not a question purely of information floating through the air, as some network neutrality advocates seem to argue. As Hayles points out, information is not in real material form until it is encoded through a medium (72). In the case of networks, without the networks, the information borders on meaningless. I am not against network neutrality in principle, I just think it?s important to follow Hayles? advice and not pretend that information/material is a dichotomy.
I was also interested in in her discussion of utopian narratives about us removing our brains (information) from our bodies (material), though for different reasons than she discusses. We forget that even if we become some weird form of pure information, we will never be fully separated from material. If we put ourselves into a huge database or ?burn? ourselves onto CD (hopefully in my case vinyl), then how does that remove us from material? We might be pure information in one sense, but we will only be pure information inside of a different material shell. In stupid books like Lawnmower Man, or even stupider movies like Ghost in the Machine, serial killers become ?pure? information. But they aren?t pure. They just switched containers! Am I missing something?
Hobart & Schiffman also dealt with information, though their explanation was more technical and more concerned with the inner-workings of digital technology. I loved the article. I have read so much this semester about the ?digital age?, but I didn?t understand exactly what digital entails. Reading the article made me look back on a piece of art I had seen before but did not fully understand. In the piece, a naked man and a naked woman were making love. The catch was that the man and woman were represented solely through 0?s and 1?s. It?s so strange to think that when I go back and look through digital pictures I took on vacation I am staring at mathematical representations of the real things I touched and smelled.
The discussion of conditional branching was intriguing as well. It is ironic that we use computers so much and start to think like computers, but for computers to improve in the ways we want them to computers have to learn to think like us. We see this with AI and automated response systems, but conditional branching was probably the most important step in teaching computers to think like us. It is kind of creepy that we can break human thought and action into an algorithm for a computer to follow. It is also alarming, growing up with Terminator and The Matrix, that we have been trying to teach computers how to think like us for 100 years. Well, if the AI ever does try to take over, at least we live in the South with all the guns.
Wiener?s article was brief and Jacob and Kati did a good job discussing his points. One brief point: Wiener writes that he is afraid automation will take jobs from people and we will enter a downturn worse than the Great Depression. We are still walking a fine line when it comes to automation and unemployment. How many jobs do people have that could be easily automated? I think specifically of Europe and its more socialist leanings. In public bathrooms in Europe there tend to be two people sitting at a table in front of the bathroom collecting money (you have to pay to use most bathrooms there). You could automate this job with your eyes shut; you wouldn?t even need computers, just coin slots on stall doors. Our humanitarian impulses mean those people keep their jobs.
I am also not going to go into too much detail on Lupton because I?m running out of space. Her analysis of our relationships with out computers is undeniably accurate though. Computers become our link to our friends, in a way more real than our actual friends. They become our work, they become our leisure, and, for a significant portion of Internet users, they become lovers (I mean that in a fairly literal ?porn is everywhere? sense). Just look at the recent Apple commercials. In them, Apple personifies Apples and PCs. We now don?t only implicitly identify our computers as having human traits, we explicitly personify them and put them in human-to-human dialogue in major advertising campaigns.