We live in a world, according to N. Katherine Hayles, where new
languages are constantly emerging, proliferating, and fading into
obsolescence. These are languages of our own making: the programming
languages written in code for the intelligent machines we call
computers. Hayles's latest exploration provides an exciting new way of
understanding the relations between code and language and considers
how their interactions have affected creative, technological, and
artistic practices. My Mother Was a Computer explores how the impact
of code on everyday life has become comparable to that of speech and
writing: language and code have grown more entangled, the lines that
once separated humans from machines, analog from digital, and old
technologies from new ones have become blurred. My Mother Was a
Computer gives us the tools necessary to make sense of these complex
relationships. Hayles argues that we live in an age of intermediation
that challenges our ideas about language, subjectivity, literary
objects, and textuality. This process of intermediation takes place
where digital media interact with cultural practices associated with
older media, and here Hayles sharply portrays such interactions: how
code differs from speech; how electronic text differs from print; the
effects of digital media on the idea of the self; the effects of
digitality on printed books; our conceptions of computers as living
beings; the possibility that human consciousness itself might be
computational; and the subjective cosmology wherein humans see the
universe through the lens of their own digital age. We are the
children of computers in more than one sense, and no critic has done
more than N. Katherine Hayles to explain how these technologies define
us and our culture. Heady and provocative, My Mother Was a Computer
will be judged as her best work yet.
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Produktdetaljer
ISBN
9780226321493
Publisert
2018
Utgave
1. utgave
Utgiver
Vendor
University of Chicago Press
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Digital bok
Forfatter