No this is not a “your momma” joke. For Monday read The Prologue, Parts I & III of Katherine N. Hayles My Mother was a Computer. Leave your comments/questions below. If you send me an email after Thursday I can respond with feedback from your final projects as my review of them will be done at that time (if not you will get them back in class on Monday).
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“A characteristic of code, as distinct from natural language, is the leverage that comes about through multiple correlations, as when a single keystroke changes the entire appearance of a text on screen…” [69]
I am not sure I agree with this interpretation. Natural language can change things in a variety of ways like a keystroke changes the behavior of code. Examples, can be seen everywhere.
•In the English language for example the use of their and there, minute and minute, too and to, coke and coke, and the list can go on and on. The words can be spelled exactly the same and carry completely different meaning. The words can sound the same and be spelled differently and carry completely different meaning. These are multiple correlations from my interpretation
•Languages compared to one another also use the same word and in different countries all have different meaning like nova (English) or no va (Spanish). In reverse some languages carry words that other languages don’t carry at all. Again multiple correlations in language
•Slang in languages also is an example of multiple correlations outside the context of code
•Sign language, gang hand signs, Morse code, Braille, all expressions that communicate meaning to individuals or the masses
Code to me is just that another language, like math, Russian, the language a doctor or lawyer uses. Each one is distinct and unique yet the same on many level. Code is not special it is just another progression a next step if you will. Ultimately, code is “written” or “programmed” like words on paper to express an outcome.
Being one who writes code for a living as well as painting and playing instruments, I find Halyes rather lopsided. I enjoy many things both analog and digital in nature. There are things both do very well and things they do not do very well. Thank goodness we have both. But, to claim that there is, “new importance with code” is a privileging statement.(p39) I am amused by how Hayles will try to convince the reader that she’s not trying to disenfranchise the novel or narrative. Then, she will do a complete 180 and write that code may be better in some ways.
I also find it odd that she spends so much time focusing on the, “simple rules,complex behavior” theorem. Is binary made up of ones and zeros? Yes. Does that make the binary system a computer uses simple? (I laugh out loud) No. Now, to be perfectly fair and not fall under the Hayles-Privileging-Syndrome myself, I will say that there are some times when the core system of a computer is amazingly simple compared to the task at hand. It depends on context. We can also make language, pictures, video, etc. simple but show complex behavior as well.
I started out this reading by looking at my notes of the book last semester. Holy crap I took a lot of notes. >_> The jist of the business is that there are a lot of questions to ask and not too many answers. If you look at the book as her p.o.v. of the shift from analog to digital and computation.
The introduction of intermediation, another ‘ation’ term, that challenges our ideas about language, subjectivity, literary objects, and text. This process of intermediation takes place where digital media interact with cultural practices associated with older media, and here Hayles sharply portrays such interactions: how code differs from speech, electronic text from print, view of computers as living beings, etc. Hayles brings to light the the connection of technology and how it has shaped our culture. The question I was going to propose is part of the story for my final project workshop so….I won’t post it. XD
And apologies if this was submitted twice. The enter key is not my friend today.
Hayle’s analysis of the progression from the analog to the digital seems to take on a metaphysical retrospective as she also puts importance on the relationship between human and computer in her idea of a post human society. The combination of both “cyber philosophy” and science that Hayle greatly expresses in Part I and Part II seems to praise the computer language of coding of more than just commands but a language that not only shaped nature but physical reality itself. At first, I was a bit perplexed of what she meant, I mean how can language shape reality, but as I read further, it was not the language itself but the process that creates the cause and effect that built this reality, especially with heavy emphasis on feedback cycles and digital processes as catalysts.
Metaphors seems to be a key element in this book especially her comparison with reality and the “Computational Universe”. She mentions that humans and computer will continue to co-evolve through means of interaction and coding. She also emphasizes the fact that one will never subjugate the other, print and digital and analog and digital will continue to go through some kind of mutation to adjust to the new post human society.
My first thought of what she was writing about was the total union between man and machine. I think about this I think bout movies that follow this thought. Johnny Mnemonic, The Matrix and the Lawn Mower Man illustrates a time where computers and man will ultimately bond and interact at once.
Starting at page 214, Greg Egan believes that it may come down to that. Although Hayle finds this this notion entertaining, she quickly scolds Egan for the basic fact that he went far beyond the boundary of the Computational Universe. Human and computer will not intertwine but continue on the same path together.
Though her book seems to aim at some sort of higher state of digital consciousness, I agree with her on the fact that information is not about who possesses it but how it is accessed. In this day in age everybody has the ability to access information in all of its diverse forms. Her ideology may prove factual when later down the road, our educational system has to do a complete overhaul to compensate for the students’ ability to access, gather and organize information through digital means.
She must be a great admirer of Derrida.
The interesting point made throughout the book is that in the process of creating these technologies (intelligent machines) we are also redefining ourselves (humankind) in the many complex and dynamic interactions (or intermediations) that take place between both at multiple levels; and as the interaction continues it’s likely that the boundaries that separate humans from the intelligent machines will become less distinguishable. And as we become more permeated by these technologies it is also logical that our language will be transformed by the interactions with computer languages, but since this is not a one-way street kind of situation, our human languages are also going to influence the way codes are being developed. All of which will have many unsuspected results that we, as participants of this moment of transformation, cannot completely foresee.
Although for the most part, Hayles tries to remain impartial throughout the book, not privileging the digital over the analog, or vice versa, there are a few times when she seems to contradict herself, such as when she discusses code in reference to speech and writing, emphasizing on one point that the relevance is only to be found in “the complex interaction generated when code interacts with speech and writing” (page 42, I believe), when in contrast to this, just a few pages earlier, she has stated that: “code exceeds both writing and speech, having characteristics that appear in neither of these legacy systems” (40).
Stephen Hawking is a computer. At least, that is what I kept thinking while reading the introduction to this text. As a brilliant mind lodged inside a useless body, he basically exists through a computer. He is a posthuman! On the second page, Hayles mentions Hans Moravec’s theory that “the corporeal embodiment that has always functioned to define the limits of the human will in the future become optional, as humans find ways to upload their consciousness into computers and leave their bodies behind.” It seems that Hawking has already done this–his mind exists without the use of the body, it is only a shell, as the real vehicle that delivers his thoughts is the computer.
The view of the universe as a computational model makes sense in an age where robotics is making significant advancements, and the rise of the robot seems just around the corner. As technology brings about our integration with the machine in increasingly profound ways, this model of the universe will make even more sense in a few decades. Survival, in a sense, is now hinged on the knowledge of computers, rather than relying on the strength of the body to hunt and gather. We now hunt and gather information. As we learn more from computers than the other humans around us, and the natural environment has been altered forever by our footprints, it is easy to see “the displacement of Mother Nature by the Universal Computer.” (3)
In a way I enjoyed how ‘My Mother Was A Computer’ means so many things at the same time (I counted at least five). I also enjoyed how each of those meanings was crucial for our proper understanding of the main ideas of the book, so crucial that the author had to be incredibly explicit about the matter: “‘My mother was a computer’ can be understood as alluding to… the title also alludes to… ‘My mother was a computer’ articulates a certain kind of anthropomorphic projection that… The final and most important significance of ‘My Mother Was a Computer…’” (3-7). In between the lines I can almost hear the author smugly asserting how clever she is.
Okay, that was mostly sarcastic. I really do appreciate the intricacies of the title, but I do wish there was some less explicit way of bringing that to the attention of the reader.
I did have one small thing to say about the bottom paragraph on page 4. Here the mother’s voice, which links us from the subjective sphere to writing, is paralleled with the voice of the computer, which has a similar function. This passage really haunting, but I wouldn’t have just characterized the voice of the computer as just “beeps, clicks, and tones.” I understand that this works better to parallel the mother’s voice, but there is much more to the aesthetic of the computer than sound. Besides my startup sound, I have my computer set up to make do system-specific sounds at all. The only sounds I hear are sounds (music, movies, etc.) that I could hear somewhere else. I would have added other aesthetic elements (visual stimuli, for example) to the sounds above. These could still be included under the umbrella of “voice.” There is much more to the “voice” of the computer than just sound.
Katherine Hayles does a good job walking the reader through the worldviews of speech, writing, and code and makes a good case for using “intermediation” to describe the complex and entangled interactions between digital mechanisms (code) and analog consciousness (speech and writing) and to signify “…the mediating interfaces connecting humans with the intelligent machines…” (33). The reader is then led to understand the notion that the world and human beings operate at the level of the digital (code) and the level of analog consciousness (speech and writing) simultaneously and that these are so entangled that it is pointless to talk about them separately. Understanding of this interplay and interaction then leads the reader to make the connection that “…subjectivity and reality are increasingly entangled with communication media” (86).
So, the nightmare that kept coming into my mind, especially in reading about Delphi and P.Burke in “Code as (Re)incarnation: The Girl Who Was Plugged In” (after reading the first two chapters), was the idea that—with the blurring of the lines between fiction and reality now made so easy through mediation and the technological advances in cybernetics and intelligent machines—the obsessive and addicted players of ARGs, given their beehive mentality and extreme desires to escape from reality by playing in reality, will be the first chosen to form the first cyborg “race.” They would be easy pickins’ and probably totally willing to be experimented on, most likely for nefarious purposes, in the guise of a new alternate reality “game.” It could happen. And then what? Then follows the race that is not a “mixed-race” but a pure bred race of sentient artificial-intelligence-machine-beings. As Hayles says, the meanings of key terms (ones that the human race has until recently believed to be fixed, stable, and secure) are shifting and the notion of the Universal Computer is begging the question of what it means to be “human.” After all, “what we make and what we (think we) are coevolve” (216).
How micro blogging affects the notion of code (via changes in expression).
Micro blogging is much like regular blogging. We’ve all seen traditional blogs.. you’ve read them. However with the growing popularity of micro blogging (via Twitter), the way in which we communicate has slightly shifted. And micro blogging is not the only instance of this change in writing either. Take a look at IM (instant messaging) or text messaging patterns – these are probably better (and earlier) examples of a change in writing style. Our way of communicating thoughts has shifted. Eloquent diction is not necessary to get one’s point across. Perfect use of language is not required to communicate gracefully. The micro blog post has shifted in to a short-form of communication. And this is form of short communication, unlike the longer traditional (and sometimes longer) blog format, is intended to inform and communicate via concise, short-format posts. With Twitter, the 140-character limit both limits and frees many users. It limits users simply by the total characters one person can post at one time. Likewise, it also frees the user from the traditional writing style.
My curiosity stems from the shift in this communication style. Now that many users are twittering back and forth for communication, how will the “code” format adjust to accommodate users’ use of colloquial expressions and acronyms (commonly used to conserve post limits on Twitter)? If the pro-code people are so adamant on suggesting the connection between language and code, how will they form the connections between short- and long-hand code? Once could argue that it is just a matter of linking up new acronyms to their long-hand and corresponding meanings. But this is not an automatic process.
If you are reading this, Hayles says you are participating in an intermediation between person and machine provided by an “Oreo” construct, analog key strokes transmigrated through discrete digital fragmentation, processing, assemblage, and then back to analog representation. She is right about that, and I have to admit spell-checker and grammar-checker process my “writing” and make it better than it would be otherwise. The result comes from an entanglement of my brain and my computer’s CPU. But my computer does not think, it augments my thinking as a hammer augments my ability to drive a nail into wood. It is a frequent fantasy that humans will create “life” complete with consciousness, but it’s just another “Furby” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Furby), an illusion. Hayles points out people inscribe narratives to all kinds of phenomena to make sense of the world – and it will likely happen with each improvement in the Roomba robot vacuum, but it is still just gears and switches.
Hayles discusses consciousness not being in complete control of things, a person is a collection of autonomous processes and desires that co-author behaviors and decisions much like a complex computer program is layered atop many lower level processes which ultimately fragment into ones and zeros indicated by voltages. Well you can’t argue with that, does anyone really want to consciously regulate all of the body’s autonomous functions? You may want to stay out late but your body tells you it’s time to sleep, your behavior and decisions are being co-authored by the conscious you and the biological you through a lower level function that communicates this status. This is an interesting observation, but hardly enough reason to extrapolate to the Theory of Everything, particularly the concept of the big computer in the sky. I don’t think Hayles is proposing this, I think she is just remarking on her cultural observations. (If at some point in the future a salesman comes calling about uploading yourself into a computer, just tell them you can’t afford it, not with all those monthly cryogenic payments for uncle Ted. http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/12/20/national/main533849.shtml )
There are almost too many ideas covered in this book.
On page 38, Hayles writes that disagrees, with McGann’s assertion that “even modest works in the print tradition are far better, as literature than the most complex and interesting works of electronic literature.” All this mixed terminology stinks. We use words we know, to describe new things we learn. And often it does not work, we put a circular peg in a square hole, but cutting corners into words so that they will fit the hole in understanding. We know stories have been told, communicated, by various means from the beginning of history. We have cave drawing, carved artifacts with inscriptions, hieroglyphs, parchments, etc. Borges, I go back to, spoke that the greatest writers in history, were in fact great orators that wrote down what they spoke.
Earlier on page 31, she writes “The contemporary indoctrination into linear causality is so strong that it continues to exercise a fatal attraction for much of the contemporary thought.” She continues the thought by writing that we cannot see print as a separate medium, that it is interconnected with other mediums. My struggle with narrative in general, is not that I am an average reader of words; it is that I have stronger visual and audible acuities. What this remediation, this “coding” tells us, is that narratives are free from any mode of communication, and that the “transmission” of narratives [stories], whether it be digital or analog, is not as important as the narratives themselves.
What I gathered from Haysles overall was that we are to put “code” into the same categorization as we have speech (which Saussure considered superior) and text, which Derrida defends and attacks by various means, and that instead of logocentric, we could end up being code-centric, using this as an intermediation between humans and the intelligent machine.
Further, she explains that while Austin’s speech acts may put acts into motion, code is the only language that is executable. (p50)
So where does this lead us? I would argue that code, despite being economical and exacting, will never be able to translate consciousness of a human being. Jeff Hawkins, through his studies of how the brain works, found that we were able to detect shapes in a way that computers cannot replicate, and that the detecting of shapes is in large part how the brain communicates. If you were to do the same detecting with a computer, the feedback loops would go on ad infinitum. So much for the economy of language that code supposedly brings.
So this concept of a man (or woman) cosigning a common language with a computer based on how our own consciousness works doesn’t seem plausible. It may be fun to think about. Being a “non-coder” who will do anything to avoid learning too many computer languages, I’m hoping that this gap is bridged in a more transparent way through intelligent interfaces rather than knowledge of the source code. That could be naivete on my part, but it’s worked so far.
It seems to me that Hayles starts by questioning, or bringing into question, universe as computer metaphor, then goes on to try and prove that we are all a product of some all-knowing programmer. If Hayles is trying to make the connection (or perhaps the separation) between consciousness and programming, she kind of shoots herself in the foot throughout chapter 8 when she discusses the Karl Sims ”Evolving Virtual Creatures” simulation.
She says that Sims went in and altered the code when some creatures developed paddles with which to smack themselves for locomotion (195). This is an unforeseen evolution the programmer decided to write out. Granted, it was an exploit of a bug, but isn’t the purpose of the simulations that “the creator does not always need to be as smart as his creatures, for he is counting on their ability to come up with solutions that have not occurred to him” (196)? How can we see what will evolve if we cut out the unexpected evolutions?
Hayles uses other examples of Sims altering the program (height, purpose, etc.) to suit his needs. Admitting the subjectivity of the experiments is good, but it goes against any attempt to compare organic and virtual evolution. Our super-computed universe does not have some master programmer deleting code every time we evolve to exploit naivety. If the universe worked that way, we’d be spam and pyramid scheme free.
The Sims “experiments” were admittedly subjective. Hayles writes, “When Sims decides which fitness criteria to use, which programs to eliminate, and which to render visually, he injects doses of his human intelligence into the system, along with the attributes we conventionally assign to humans, including desires and intentions. Moreover, his published articles make clear that his intentions affected virtually every aspect of the design, so it is not possible to bracket out his intentions by saying that we should consider only the programs in themselves, not the global system.”
If the virtual evolution was all about authorial intent from the beginning, what separates virtual creatures from traditional literature? Nabokov intended for readers to follow a certain logic path through his narrative. Sims intended for viewers to see certain emergent patterns in his. Since each controlled his message source, we receive the message as intended by the authors. Chapter 8 seems more to confirm that we are the controlled objects of subjective authors than the evolutionary offspring of a universal control computer.
This is really late and for that, I apologize, but technology problems prevented me from posting anytime earlier this week.
Anyway, on to Hayles. This may strike some as funny, but throughout the entire text, I couldn’t get the catchphrase “She/he’s just not that into you” out of my head. For some reason, I really didn’t enjoy Hayles. It’s basically because I couldn’t make rhyme or reason out of her thought processes. She’d say one thing that I thought I understood, but then she’d turn right around and say exactly the opposite. The text was the most comprehensible when Hayles was sharing her own ideas rather than trying to parse others, but these passages are too few and far between.
One passage that stumped me early on was on page 27, when she said: “In the regime of Computation, code is understood as the discourse system that mirrors what happens in nature and that generates nature itself.” In this, is she arguing that code is superior than writing and speaking in this “Regime of Computation” or is she simply arguing that it’s a separate entity until itself? If she is arguing that code is an entity all by itself, then that makes sense. But I fail to see how code is better than writing or speaking as a method of communication as you can’t evoke feeling in code.
I could go on, but I’d like to get at least these preliminary thoughts out there before technology shuts me down again.