For Thursday read My Mother Was a Computer and comment below. Anyone who handed in paper topics last week should have received feedback via email today. If not you can email me as there was mistake. Those who were late will receive feedback by tomorrow (Saturday).
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In _My Mother Was a Computer_, N. Katherine Hayles seems to take an evolutionary perspective on the rise of digital sensibility and computer culture. This perspective is opposed to Eisenstein’s revolutionary perspective on the advent of the print. I think the difference between the two perspectives—a new medium as a phase of evolution vs. point of revolution—reflects the degree to which one views new media as cooperating with and contributing to old media, even as the old medium surrenders hegemony. Technological prostheses (writing) and biological evolutions (speech) help us impose digitization on analog activities, according to Hayles, so the two media are intertwined and don’t cancel each other out.
The best example I found of Hayles’s perspective of technology as an evolution is on page 211, where she talks about hybridity. “Print culture and print subjectivity do not disappear but mutate, as distributed cognitive environments stimulate new kinds of narratives.” Where the digital is discrete and the analog is continuous, it seems the two evolve simultaneously to create this hybrid entity. “The evolution of complexity” (55) cannot be overstated here—nothing is as simple as it seems, or as we want it to seem.
Hayles resists a completely techno-determinist or instrumentalist viewpoint by continuously insisting on “multiple causalities, complex dynamic, and emergent possibilities” (5) that exist in the many forms of intermediation (encounters between material bodies and digital/virtual subjects). Hayles defends the position that humans must participate in an analog world on some level, and any interpretation of the world must be mediated by human consciousness. First, she claims, “media effects, to have meaning and significance, must be located within an embodied human world” (7). Later she writes, “the world as we sense it on a human scale is basically analog” (56). (A notion that is perhaps to contrary to the belief of the die-hard, 24-7 cyborg, Steve Mann, whom Rheingold writes about in _Smart Mobs_.) So, the reader clearly understands Hayles’s belief that the digital can never completely replace the analog; the two are a part of each other.
The metaphorical Oreo of inscription is the best example of this synergy. In the Oreo, the analog representations sandwich the digital middle (207). Thus, even the most advanced digital technologies (inscriptions) are book-ended by some analogic representation (material embodiments/physical realities). She references PET images as an example of Oreo structures. I wonder if another example might be the movement to digitize libraries, which wants to migrate print books to scanned images. The other end of the Oreo here is that some people will always need/want to print certain pages from the book. Ultimately, the Oreo reflects Hayles’s conviction about the persistent structure of the analog in human understanding of the world.
My Mother was a Computer was an exciting book for me to read; its approach to the question of the “Computational Universe” through literary analysis was an accessible one, and an intriguing way to bring an increasingly marginalized field (literary studies) into the realm of new media studies. As her starting point, Hayles takes the question of whether the conception of a computational universe is metaphorical, or an accurate representation of an ontology we are at the threshold of understanding, in an era when the mind can contemplate the mind. The answer is both, of course, as the idea of nature as fundamentally digital becomes a part of our philosophy, literature, and language. It seems that metaphor plays a crucial role for Hayles, not least in determining the difference between speech and writing on one hand, and code on the other. Where speech and writing are descriptive, and take on meaning in the consciousness of the listener/reader, code is prescriptive, and performative, “the only language that is executable” (p. 50). Code creates rather than names, but it “can tolerate little if any ambiguity” (46); but ambiguity is the stuff of which metaphors are made, the space where a mind makes a connection that is not explicit. Thus it seems that code has an advantage over speech and writing—it enacts rather than describes—as well as a disadvantage—it cannot deal with ambiguity, a vital characteristic of human speech and communication.
Who is the agent that acts? This is the crucial question of the final section, “Transmitting.” Machines, like the character in Stanislaw Lem’s story “Mask,” are driven by programs that force them to work in a certain way. Are humans any different? Are their actions driven by biological programs that are essentially emergent processes that have evolved to make humans interact and perceive the way they do? If so, there is no appreciable difference between the agency of humans and that of machines, and the freedom of both is a complicated issue. Is it possible that the idea of the digital universe is only a metaphor, and that there is some core difference between man and machine? The more I read about the subject, the more I question what was once a knee-jerk response (of course there’s a difference!). It seems we are heading in a direction where metaphor becomes reality through the complex “feedback loops” of intermediation, and while it is still possible to conceptualize a difference between “nature” and “machine,” that difference is becoming ever less tenable.
In re-reading Hayles I couldn’t help but think about Kurzweil’s “Age of Spiritual Machines.” I don’t know how the two got connected in my mind aside from both showing a general tendency for humans to accept technological advancement. Luddites aside, we often just work new technology into our lives. Hayles, we replaced humans with machines for certain jobs – computers, for one, but there are others. Kurzweil sees the potential for humans to replace themselves with machines. Not just machines, but virtual replications of “self” to download into bio-mech bodies as we wear out our original bodies.
The main connection between the two, I think, is the evolution of human thinking. Hayles describes the changing metaphors – clock, Mother Nature, computer – to represent the human, the world, or whatever. As she points out throughout the book, we take whatever technology is commonplace at the time and formulate a way to compare ourselves to it. Kurzweil demonstrates the physical version of this in a sub-narrative diary of his imagined reader. (I think he called her Molly, but I’ve misplaced the text at the moment.) Basically, this sub narrative shows Molly’s thinking process change from bordering on Luddite mentality to accepting technology, and some fairly interesting uses of technology, as she moves toward actually downloading her consciousness into another body and eventually a nanite fog of some sort.
Like Kurzweil, Hayles writes about changing attitudes toward technology and its uses. “On a metaphysical level, … computation has been transformed from a metaphor into the means by which reality is generated…” (225). That passage has always reminded me of the cylons on Battlestar Galactica. They project the reality in which they live and can change it as needed. We are changing the way we see reality with every new use of technology. How long before we project what we want into the world? And how long after that do we download our “selves” into whatever technology has built for us? Everything hinges on what we are willing to accept and integrate into our metaphor and our lives.
I feel as if I’m missing a lot having not read her earlier books or maybe this is just way over my head. It seems as if I only understand snippets of what she is talking about.
In Ms. Hayles prologue she defines some of the issues that are at the centre of the larger project, including not only the effects of a post-biological future, but also the importance of new thinking about materiality, the computational universe, and intermediation, or what she refers to as the “traffic between language and code.” Later on in the book I get the impression that we are that traffic.
Hayles references the works of several other “Digital Philosophers” and points to the development of literacy and books during the Renaissance, as being instrumental to the development of humanism and the humanist subject. She views writing (or the transfer of knowledge through writing) as a crucial element of our psychological, sociological and physiological development and that the human body is or has become a form of media in itself.
I think she is suggesting that the human body is the analog connection, link between, or mediator between the language and code, print and electronic texts, the analog and the digital. Hayles implies that we are moving towards the possibility of uploading our identities and consciousness into the machine (computer). Actualy, I thought that was what we were in the process of doing.
I believe Hayles is in opposition with some who claim the computer to be the only medium left standing as all other media (audio, video, and books) are converted into digital code.
“My Mother Was A Computer” asks some interesting questions about the “humanness” of machines and the “machinness” of humans. I found the question of agency interesting. (177) If we as humans are thought of as machines, then agency “cannot be securely located in the conscious mind.” On the other hand, if machines are like humans, they must posess agancy “even though they are not conscious.”
If a computer has agency, can it act as an intelligent agent? Discussion of the Semantic Web designates machines as middleware agents that can accept a request, read and process code, know our preferences, “speak” to other computer agents to find the best answer and deliver the desired results. There will be no more web searches as we know them currently. The Semantic Web model implies that the machine understands our desire and is empathetic to that end. It could be said that the Semantic Web gives birth to a machine with agency and desire.
Code ( like RDF, SparqL, OWL) is the glue that holds it all together, bringing context to our web pages and databases. But code is just code, a very simple system that can evolve in such a way as to create complex systems. It seems that this development is bringing the web into a new era, where all of the web is a World Wide Database. As Kurzweil has suggested, the singularity is near.
With My Mother is a Computer, Katherine Hayles looks at text from the new digital age, and how it has changed from the day of just using pen and paper. Some points that are looked at are how text has changed given the new technology of today and if we are really still dealing with the same text of yesterday.
In part two of the book, Hayles reviews not just her own thoughts but other authors on the transformation of text to the digital plain and whether of not it changes the format of it all together. “When texts are translated in electronic environments, the attempt to define as an immaterial verbal construct, already problematic for print, opens a Pandora’s box of additional complexities and contradictions…”.(95)
Some thoughts on this from the book are that people are afraid that the print document has lost its value and is no longer needed, but that is far from the truth. As we read in the book, “No print document can be re-programmed once the ink has been impressed on the paper, whereas electronic text routinely can. These differences do not mean, of course, that print is inferior, to electronic text, only that it is different.(100)
The digital text is just another evolutionary step for the print document, just like it had one four centuries ago with the creation of the printing press. This still does put everyone to ease though. There are plenty that wonder just what place the print document will have in the future. Even though print is evolving through the computer, it should never be thought that original use of text will stop having a purpose.
Going back to part 1, Hayles tells us “Speech and writing, in my view should not be seen as predecessors to code that with wither away but as vital partners of scale in the evolution of complexity.”(55) I think after all of this I would have to ask, not about print, but rather the evolution of man and how he will come to deal with the future of the digital text.