Humans and their Machines (1)
In her book Modest_Witness@Second_Millenium FemaleMan©_Meets_OncoMouse etc…Donna Haraway says the following: “The computer is a trope, a part-for-whole-figure, for a world of actors and actants and not a Thing Acting Alone. Computers cause nothing, but the human and nonhuman hybrids troped by the figure of the information machine remake worlds. (126)
Haraway is making a crucial point here and one that will suffuse this blog entry. Our culture tends to draw easy distinctions between machines and humans, distinctions that encourage us to believe that the nonhuman is separate from us and that we simply use computers as tools. Rather, I believe that we have always mapped technology into and onto our beings and our bodies. The distinctions that we have to draw are not between machines and ourselves, but between different levels of involvement with technologies, different levels of synergy and interdependence. This doesn’t mean that the tensions that exist between ourselves and computers are unimportant. Rather, the relationship is largely defined by the many mediations that exist to supplement and enhance the depth of the interaction. Bruno Latour has called this ‘a collective of humans and nonhumans’ and by this he means that the links between humans and their technologies makes things possible that neither could achieve without the other. The best way to think about what Latour is saying, is not through the metaphor of the machine as a manipulator, but technology as an inherent constituent of everything that we define as human. For Latour, computer and human form a collective and crucially, are continuously acting together in an associative chain that is only interrupted as we move to different levels of complexity. Part of the problem here is that so much of what makes technology work is not necessarily visible and that makes it appear as if the technology is very distant from users, participants and viewers. The gap between the systems that guide the operations of computers and our ability to change the underlying programming language is a vast one.
The Linux movement is a partial, albeit rather particular, response to this issue. The gap tends to reinforce the idea that we are not acting in concert with the computer and that it is just a device that we use. I believe that computer games and the excitement that they generate are a partial response to the need to actualize our collective engagement with technology in general. This is extended even further through internet-based gaming cultures.
At a deeper level, the desire to overcome the limitations of the computer screen as an interface between experience and seeing, has resulted in a paradoxical desire to transform the screen into a device of interaction. The joy of travelling through the screen in an imaginary fashion is partially about taking some control over the technology and exercising a degree of power over the images and sounds that the computer produces.
But, for the most part, we are dealing with spatial representations bounded by frames and hindered by the characteristics of the screen as a two-dimensional device. The extraordinary thing is how ready we are to “play” with these limitations and how so much energy has been devoted to conquering the problems that the interfaces pose for us. This is evidence of the collective effort in which we are engaged. And the interesting thing is how we are fundamentally altering the material basis for our own experiences of the world we live in. If we were not already collectively engaged with technology, we would not be able to adapt to the cultural shifts in which we are producing.
