Sometimes when I read works spouting the benefits of technological advancement, I often catch myself wanting to resist what they are telling me. I have yet to figure out exactly where this hesitation comes from and why I have an aversion to aligning myself so closely with all things computable. I can probably ramble on for a while debating all the reasons. Undeniably, we are moving to an increasingly technological society, and clearly I am an active participant. After all, right now I’m typing for a blog, I check my Facebook regularly, bank online and I willingly seek out medical expertise aided and made possible through machines. That only skims the surface of the ways I am pro-technology. However, parts of this movement feel cold. Parts of this movement make me concerned that technology can, will and has already made the human obsolete.
I struggle with my hesitation because I feel I am being extraordinarily hypocritical. How can I experience anxiety and dig in my roots calling for tradition when I align myself with socially progressive movements to advocate a voice for marginalized groups: be it women struggling under an oppressive patriarchy, gay and transgender rights and most dearly, the disabled children I worked with for years? Why wouldn’t I want technology to advance to a point where these groups could also advance and thrive? What the hell is my problem?! This divide is a source of extreme frustration.
For now, I’ll concentrate on my hesitation derived from “My Mother Was a Computer” by Katherine Hayles. This push towards coding made up of the binary 1 and 0, signaling direction one way or another, makes for an extremely utilitarian existence. It extracts any emotion and frankly, inspiration from the creative process. I’ve watched this impact my friends in the MAPC program. For a project, they’ll have these grand aspirations to produce something aesthetic and wonderful, but because they are not always privy to the complex dialogue of the computer, they are incapable of achieving the results they desire. I've been there this year, making up parts of the Faculty Bookshelf for the English Department. More times than I'd like to admit, when the code is off by even one letter or number, I wound up looking at something similar to the Blue Screen of Death...
Yea. You know what I'm talking about.
There is no room for error, because any miscommunication renders it unreadable. It is a helpless feeling. Hayles references an interview with computer programmer Ellen Ullman who says very clearly that, “…a computer program has only one meaning: what it does. It isn’t a text for an academic to read. Its entire meaning is its function” (48).
What draws me to the tradition of writing is that while there is most definitely miscommunication between what is said, what is meant and what is read, it isn’t equated with being flat out wrong. Things can be said and written for a variety of reasons, good and bad, personal and communicative, didactic or aesthetic, but whatever it intends, there is still a privileging of human involvement and feeling. Coding for me is cold and once again conjures up these feelings of an extracted and rendered useless humanity. But then again, when these codes function properly, there have been some truly wonderful technological things to come about which can make good things happen for humanity. So here again, I find myself at an impasse.
It sounds like you want to know the answer to the all important question "What porridge hath Keats?" Your post reminds me of the debates between styles of reading and discerning meaning that we discussued in our Literary Theory Class. I think that many people have a desire to know things like historical context and authorial intention (a la Keats's attitudinal porridge) and to feel as though interpretation can be in their hands. The ambiguities that exist in language but are not allowed in code seem to touch on the anxieties associated with losing individuality at the hands of some sort of artificial intelligence. Although technology can be helpful in the ways you mention, I think it does produce anxiety because it is somewhat disconcerting to think that a computer can do nearly everything that I can do (and somethings even better than I...). I just wonder if it can play tennis...
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