Coding in Crisis

Katherine Hayles seems to have successfully convinced me that literature, art, new media and communication aren’t on different trajectories after all. As of a few weeks ago, my post had lingered on the anxiety that the computer and its coded language, and all its minions, were isolated from that which is human and supposedly “natural.” That sounds incredibly naïve in retrospect. I suppose it just took some incredibly poignant examples in Hayles’ work Electronic Literature to show that it is through different mediums, technological or not, that we extend ourselves, out of our bodies, into the world to reach others.

Initial resistance aside, it should come as no surprise to me that this is merely just the evolution of communication. A turn towards multimodal expressions in print has been a long time coming. Typeface on a page is limiting and the degree to which it can communicate, minimal. We are more than that, plain and simple.

Particularly in moments of intensity and crisis, humans need that extension so desperately. How many examples from the media do we need to see that communicative tools, often encoded, have brought about stories of humanity? Vaguely, I am reminded of stories where trapped individuals after a natural disaster communicate through tapping, shining of a light, transmitting some sort of signal on a cell phone, beeper, elevator shaft that they are there and alive. A crude example from a movie is when the hero from Dante’s Peak has survived the volcanic explosion. In the aftermath he is trapped in a truck in an abandoned mine. His only means of communication is a device he managed to switch on. For days the beacon lit up in the volcano research center but his colleagues paid no attention to it, thinking that it was faulty. Only after being exposed to the blinking for days do they realize this technology was acting as a piece of coded communication. They drive out to the scene of the disaster, locate the characters and everyone lived happily ever after.

Movie magic aside, the most poignant example for me was Hayles’ analysis of the print novel, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. What strikes me about this novel is that, though it is a fictional account of the events from 9-11, it is composed from real sensations and moments of interface from that terrible day. Without technological mediums, many of those final moments between friends and family would not have been possible. In the novel, the last words of the father are transmitted through an answering machine. His words, translated into print, would not have been done justice if merely printed like I am typing now. The spacing, color gradient and interruption of the typeface precisely convey the uncertainty, chaos and desperate feeling of the moment. Hayles accurately understands that this digital representation is necessary to communicate, though not always initially clear, the “message’s human import” (167). Indeed, sometimes coded interactions require a second and third viewing/listening to infer the meaning.