I’m back. After a 5 month hiatus I’ve resumed my thesis work. And here’s what jumped out at me today:
I think I’ve found a bridge between writing technologies and retrieving information more ‘organically.’ In my proposal I suggested that computer mediated communication, the rhetorical vehicles by which information would be disseminated in digital environments, enable us to view texts in new ways. To quote myself, “advances of conceptualization due to the non-linear nature of digital environments are most evident in the complex associations we see in these online publications. New technology has grown up around the traditional linear presentation of texts, and is becoming more of an extension of the human mind…”
I came across an old blog post by Richard MacManus (2004) in which a conversation between Talan Memmott (editor of hypertext/media journal Beehive who incidentally has this amazing piece called Self Portrait(s) [as Other(s)] published by the Iowa Review Web) and theorist Gregory Ulmer is linked. Turned out it’s a paper by Florian Cramer called “Digital Code and Literary Text” that uses the shift in the theoretical debate of literature as its base (enter hypertext, hyperfiction, hypermedia, etc.).
Basically, the bridge is this little thing we call “speech act theory.” A speech act is a linguistics term that has several distinct concpetual meanings to describe what we do when we speak (i.e. what is the rhetorical act/outcome of our words to another person). John L. Austin introduced the term “illocutionary act” (synonymous with “speech act,” meaning that “by saying something, we do something”) to describe one of these conceptions, in his 1962 text How to Do Things with Words.
Florian Cramer concludes that “while all literature should teach us to read and deal with the textuality of computers and digital poetry, computers and digital poetry might teach us to pay more attention to codes and control structures coded into all language.” My question is: are digital poetry and computer codes direct results of the codes and control structures coded into all language? Is computer coding organic in that sense?
The Doonesbury strip above was taken from a web archive of the 1997 MIT symposium: Communicative Action in Humans and Machines. It is meant as an account of speech act meaning. Click the image for a larger view.
Cramer states that “program code contaminates in itself two concepts which are traditionally juxtaposed and unresolved in modern linguistics: the structure, as conceived of in formalism and structuralism, and the performative, as developed by speech act theory.” When we do something by saying something (for example, by Ted telling Maria, “The ice is thin, watch out,” he is performing the act of warning her), the “act” is specifically built into the language code. There is a cause and effect situation there. Likewise, computer language is coded to yield a particular result. When the code is ”spoken,” and “act” is performed, depending on the desired outcome - similar to what happens in conversation or in print.
Organic is now a characteristic of computer code, in that it seeks to elicit a particular response through the written word as a symbol made up of ones and zeroes (based, of course on Lawrence Lessig’s claim that computer code is speech). So when I suggest that “[technology] has become more of an extension of the human mind, in that it utilizes video, sound, and text in concert to simulate how humans process information…” perhaps I mean to focus on the coding of the language found in online literary journals (specifically, that of poetry and new media*).
*When I mention “new media” I think of how video and sound work together to elicit particular emotions or reactions.
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