A Little Hawking Bragging on the Playground: "My dad is a super computer."

N. Katherine Hayles dedicated My Mother Was a Computer to her mother, whom, she says in her dedication, "was not a computer." We can certainly deduce that Hayles's mother probably wasn't a computer, but there is a highly-renowned physicist who, from the physical appearance to the sound of the mechanized "voice," may be mistaken for a living, breathing computer. Stephen Hawking, physically motionless because of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (commonly known ass Lou Gehrig’s Disease) and confined to a mechanized wheelchair, communicates verbally with a computerized voice that he produces with a twitch of his cheek.

Hayles, in "Speech, Writing, Code: Three Worldviews," describes the evolution of speech, writing and code and how each mode of communication "reinterprets" the preceding communicative system, "inscribing prior values into its own dynamic." The combination of all three communicative systems, especially as they meld into one another in their advancements from verbal communication to writing to the codes "talk" to each other to make electronic things work, has developed into what we've been discussing as new media. This combination also appears in Stephen Hawking’s entire physical makeup, which, we could argue, makes him something of a new media machine. He has lost the ability to speak with his own voice, but he still maintains the ability to speak; however, in order to speak, he has to write his thoughts, using the cheek twitch, on the monitor attached to his wheelchair. The code that is entered by the cheek twitch into Hawking’s electronic interface is transformed into the robotic voice that is projected from the audio apparatus built into the wheelchair. We immediately have his profound theories of the universe, thoughts on black holes and questions about the origins of man in the first rung on the communicative ladder: speech.

Internet comedians/musicians “Nice Peter” and “Epic Lloyd” have created, using new media techniques a series of hilarious videos titled Epic Rap Battles of History. In the seventh installment of season one, Stephen Hawking (played by Nice Peter) battles Albert Einstein (played by MC Mr. Napkins), with whom he has real-life qualms over black holes. Hawking, in the installment has been given a computerized voice, though not the same as the one used in reality. This voice has the autotune sound that was originated by singer/bandleader, Roger Troutman, who used a vocoder or talkbox to alter the pitch of his voice, and popularized by rapper/singer/noisemaker, T-Pain. In the battle, Hawking and Einstein trade insults, which is the typical fashion of a rap battle. While the outcome is debatable—The battle ends with the question of “Who won?” (My eight-year-old son contends that Stephen Hawking won while I believe Albert Einstein ate his lunch.)—Stephen Hawking had a one-liner that was intended to sum up his superiority to Einstein and which also allows him to stake a claim as something more than a human. He says to Einstein, “While it’s true that my work is based on you, I’m a super computer; you’re like a TI-82.”