Digital Overlords

[flutingfrenzy]

I came so close to posting this in the online discussion I'm leading:

About language existing outside the individual, do you suppose this means that when computers finally become sentient and start slowly filling our heads with code with the intention of simultaneously making us intellectually sluggish and leaving messages for other computers to

Comments

[clodia_risa]

I've been sitting on this post all afternoon trying to decide what to say.

I say that the language of the computer reaching for another computer is Schrodinger's language.It is likely language. Let's work backwards. Entity A sends out a code (whether into space or downloaded directly into human's brains is irrelevant). Entity B discovers said code and figures out what it says. ("I think...I think it's trying to communicate" if this were a cheesy scifi film.) That? Officially language. But what if Entity B can't figure out what Entity A is trying to say. What if it relies on pulses in the ultraviolet spectrum that Entity B can't perceive? I would still call Entity's A code to be language, for it could be deciphered by those who had the same capacity but not the same mind as Entity A. What I'm getting to is that any code which could be broken by another person could be considered a language

[flutingfrenzy]

You might find the article we were discussing to be relevant. Let's see here. I'll e-mail it to you.

The part we were getting our ideas from was "Words and Abstractions," which starts on page 96.

[evilhippo]

... I want to read what you guys are reading. Anything that spawns thoughts like that must be very interesting.

Though the quote in the edit reminds me too much of the sort of things people used to post to discussion boards just to fill in the participation requirement for the week. It makes no sense, unless you've been reading the sort of intellectually-irresponsible awful things that redefine perfectly useful words like "disembodiment" to mean things almost entirely unrelated to their original meaning. If we're commodifying anything, it's our minds, our experiences and things that (by the textual nature of most sites) have to be disembodied to be shared. I think his point would've been better made if he'd managed to at least mention facebook, rather than twitter. At least on facebook you have to make an effort to disemtagbody yourself from the horrible pictures your friends post of whatever it was you did the night before. I do get the sense that he's looking at it from the opposite direction I am (I view the internet as a

[flutingfrenzy]

That week was a pretty awesome one for readings. I kind of hit the jackpot getting to lead the discussion on them. The language one actually was very interesting, but the mapping one (which the edit was referring to) made me see the internet in a new way.

I'ma e-mail you both. I've been showing the mapping one to everyone I think would like it. I sort of have a crush on it.

I think it helps to have the context of the class and the discussion to see what he was getting at, although I'll reserve judgment on whether he was just saying words to get in the participation requirement. I do agree that our minds are being commodified more than our bodies are, and that facebook would be a better example. Actually, I think it makes the most sense if you take "bodies" to mean "existences" rather than "physical containers," although in that case, it should have been expressed that way.