Media theory & computer

Yonggeun Kim at Soongsil Univ., Seoul, South Korea lectures@exosomatics.com

This presentation is the summary of Geoffrey Winthrop-Youngs WinthropHardware/Sofware/Wetware, Hardware/Sofware/Wetware, in Critical Terms for Media Studies, Studies, ed. W. J. T. Mitchell and Mark B. N. Hansen (University of Chicago Press, 2010), 186-198. 186-

On Computer Machine? medium? or else? Answers upon the context of media theory In short what new conceptual frameworks does what media theory have to develop in order to integrate the computer? computer?

Media theory
Still in the immature stage with the intersection of multiple disciplines. However there are two dominant biases.  Communication and  (inter)mediality (inter)mediality

 Communication
Its culmination was mathematical theory of communication with its rigorous abstraction from the particular qualities of distinct media. And this is what computer performs on a technological level.

 Mediality
The focus on the distinctive features of any one media technology can only take place against a background of other medial experience. Mediality is always already intermediality. intermediality.

 The computer tells us something about the construction of all the media formats it simulates.
a technology that is recasting all its predecessors.

Rethinking computer

Software / hardware
1. The computer/software binaries body and spirit 2. Software/hardware relation over dualism by insisting that the performance and identity of (biological and electronic) agents emerge from the mutually corporeal and incorporeal components Embodiment in mental and affective processes and the material physiological conditions One is useless without the other.

Software / hardware
1850s The woolen or cotton fabric and more generally to perishable consumer goods. 1958 by John W. Tukey suggested neologism. Today the software comprising the carefully planned interpretive routines, compliers, and other aspects of automotive programming are at least as important to the modern electronic calculator as its hardware of tubes, transistors, wire, tapes and the like.

wetware
 Dysfunctional component, first and foremost a source of error  The Sandman by E. T. A. Hoffmann  By adopting behavior patterns that programmed hardware cannot emulate, they emphasize their idosyncratic wetware features as to not to be mistaken for robots.  The result will be something that exceeds both humans and computers because it retains and rejects elements of both. In short, wetware isto activate a sleeper term is that went hiding a few decades agoa truly dialectical ago concept.

Rethinking computer

Mutual disdain

No software, no hardware, and ultimately no media?

Science as a Vocation by Max Weber
The increasing intellectualization and rationalization do not, therefore, indicate an increased and general knowledge of the conditions under which on lives. It means something else, namely, the knowledge or belief that if one but wished one could learn it at any time. time. there are no mysterious incalculable forces that come into play This means that the world is disenchanted.

Its capabilities outstrip our imagination

No software
Kittler All hardware operations, he asserts, can be reduced to basic hardware operations:
All code operations come down to absolutely local string manipulations, that is, I am afraid, to signifiers of voltage differences.

Omnipotence is the delusion of software

No hardware
Everything can be converted into software, and other media remediated on computers are nothing more than a software packages. (Arjen (Arjen Mulder) Mulder)
e.g.) emulation

No media?
The argument moves from technological reductionism to a technologically evolved version of ideology criticism.
Anyhow a total media link on a digital basis will erase the very concept of medium (Kittler).

Computer as an object of media theory slips out of the boundary of media theories.
Kittler, the history of alphanumerical codes. Mulder, Mulder, a unified software theory.

Technology and humans. Are they completely separate entities? Just as there was no fully developed media theory before (or without) the computer, there was no fully developed human before (or without) technology. Technology as an ontological condition of humanization.

The computer is simultaneously model, external structure, and an integral part of our evolution, and the boundary conflicts between hardware, software, and wetware are both indicative of, and complicit in, the constant reshaping of the fluid boundaries between technological properties, signifying practices, and human bodies, none of which predated the shifting alignments between three. Media theory, finally will have to realize the extent to which it has been itself inscribed by this coevolution of humans and machines.