HOW LONG HAVE WE BEEN SAYING “YES, COMPUTER” ?

The computer used to be a thing of myth and legend, fear and loathing. Think of early science fiction writings about fantastic machines, evil robots, alien civilizations with advanced technologies and malicious intentions, and all those mad scientists - concocting monstrosities on the slabs, up in their labs.

Since the industrial revolution, the automation of mechanical processes from the simplest things like the washing machine, to more complex things like the automobile assembly line, has dominated modern efforts towards making humans less reliant on others of their species. All things technological, including computers have been heralded as a panacea to the world’s problems, but on the flipside, since the provocation of the legendary factory worker Ned Lud in 1811, at least, have been treated with hostility and contempt. [The Luddites].

The emergence of science fiction writing in the 19th century, and later through movies in the early 20th century continued an age-old suspicion of the new and spawned modern technophobia. In any event, romantic (erotic?) literature of the 19th century thrived on ghastly (erotic?) acts between humans and beasts, humans and aliens, or humans and robots that would otherwise not have passed censorship had those same acts been human-on-human, and this setup some of the themes and archetypes for science-fiction that continue to this day, Cyborgs (man-machine hybrids) notwithstanding.

Movies like Metropolis and even Charlie Chaplin’s “Modern Times” connected the industrial capitalist complex's use of technology with the further exploitation of workers , and The Day The Earth Stood Still (1951), which included a killer robot and an anti-nuclear-war message, expounded the negative attributes of technology, especially when technology runs amok with potentially catastrophic consequences for humanity.

It could be said that in the decades since the 1980’s, computer technology has been more generally accepted as a positive contributor to society. Thanks largely to advances in Japan and Silicon Valley, digital technologies have become infused into everyday aspects of our lives and we hardly consider the devices we use to be ‘computerised’, thanks to the continual improvements in microchip sizes and speeds of calculation. The average cellular-phone nowadays has more processing power onboard than all the Apollo spacecraft combined, yet we barely recognise the complexity of these machines and the additional complexity they bring to every aspect of our lives.

But despite the general adoption the microchip into ubiquitous devices, and despite the dramatic rise of personal computing since the early 1990’s, the new ‘virtual reality’ that satellite communications, electronic banking and the internet have ushered in is still met with varying degrees of technophobia that techno-romantics find perplexing and culturally challenging at the same time. Early electronic music pioneers Kraftwerk made a career of predicting “Computer Love” almost three decades before internet-dating sites were born - a classic case of life imitating art! The platforms of Facebook and indeed Pythagoras-tv are indebted to an online culture born from the clunky multi-user domains of the mid-1990’s that dived deeply into the unknown. Their impact on politics, education and entertainment is still unfolding.

And what about that almost forgotten musical genre “Techno”? An entire decade of dance music dedicated to a world dominated by the desire to fuse man, machine and artificial intelligence, with manufactured mental states of consciousness and positivity at its core. For a while techno-positivists such as The Shamen and Orbital mesmerized a youth culture getting over Grunge before British Indie-Rockers Radiohead countered the charge with a rather resigned capitulation to life in the modern world (and its increasingly alienated state) with their masterpiece – “OK COMPUTER” - so the battle continues…

And now the computer enables the creation of new and fantastic worlds - a “virtual reality” – indeed a whole genre of ‘transarchitecture’ [Marcos Novak] that merges the physical and virtual through user interactivity and ‘immersion’ has emerged. From the early attempts with oversized ‘VR’ helmets and navigation gloves, to the highly responsive Wii with its motion-sensing wireless controllers, to evolved visualization software, the navigation through and manipulation of massively complex data is becoming less a thing of fiction and more a matter of fact - the AlloSphere Research Facility in California being a leader in the field.

Still in California, the current crop of 3-D CG animation movies, where an escape into new and incredibly imaginative ‘worlds’ for ninety minutes becomes possible, is a film genre that is proving to be one of the most bankable. Aided by rapid advances in processing power and software programming, not to mention motion-sensing for human-to-computer modeling of detailed character behaviour - the partnership of Disney and Pixar is a telling example of the way in which digital animation has trounced Walt’s layered method of acetate and paint.

And who indeed didn’t want to enter “The Matrix” and take part in its gravity defying gymnastic action, or wish to ‘plug-in’ and immerse themselves in hyper alternate realities?

Consider too the hyperspace of online social networking; in essence a series of virtual worlds where we mediate our real world personalities with digitized emulations sharing select aspects of ourselves, our experiences, thoughts and emotions with equally ‘virtual’ others. These virtual personas can sometimes vary in definition, to the extent that one can take on several augmented identities. The most tangible instances of people embedding extensions of their person into virtual reality are the ‘avatars’ of online virtual worlds such as Second Life, where virtual personalities take on physical characteristics, and interact “behaviourally” with others.

Even in the “real” world where telecommunication devices as “simple” as the mobile phone have become non-negotiable and global positioning (GPS) navigation devices are arriving on every dashboard and increasingly in mobile phones too, we see proof that our reliance on a network of information that transcends geographical limitations has made us the avatars of our own hybrid reality. Through information technology, people are becoming more and more easy to locate, manage and manipulate – “I am away from the office” is no longer an opportunity to escape duty, and one’s Facebook photographs depicting weekend indiscretions or a newly acquired friend can trigger real-world consequences and have already been used in work-place dismissals and divorces.

Indeed the concerns of governments and corporations becoming “Big Brother” and enacting social controls like the much feared embedding of microchips into people in order to monitor migration and thus enable a cashless society, and other cybernetic control systems to monitor and take away “civil liberties” (of those who protest the further contamination of our natural environment or other political issues), are common concerns.

Perhaps the biggest fear should be that as we celebrate the computer in its positive impact during the Information Age, and the myriad tools and trinkets that technology spawns, we may neglect that the computer is still an artifice of humankind’s creation, and that our objectives regarding its increasingly powerful potential going forward need constant debate. We are still in control of the development of computing and its applications, and need to remain as such.

The above examples are an indication of a profound ‘YES’ towards the computer on the behalf of humanity. In the last decade developments in computing have enabled an almost seamless integration of digital technology into secular culture and it is finally being embraced by one and all. In the last few years especially, since the ubiquity of mobile phones and online social networking, most people have embraced some form of information technology or another into their lives. Indeed the computer is no longer the device of the mad scientist or the geek.

Kraftwerk’s somewhat romantic notion of living in a “Computer World” is no longer a fantasy.

References:
http://www.pointlessmuseum.com/computer/
http://www.digibarn.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_science_fiction_films
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolis_(1927_film)
http://www.willamette.edu/~gorr/classes/cs130/lectures/history.htm
[pic ENIAC, a general purpose computer, designed and built by Eckert and Mauchly and completed in 1946.]
http://www.esi.uclm.es/museo/index_en.html - Virtual Museum of Computing – offers 3D models of computer technology
http://www.evula.com/reports/technophobia.html
http://books.google.co.za/books?id=BA_1sOD40K4C&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_navlinks_s#v=onepage&q=&f=false
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technophobia
For more on the early history of Sci Fi: http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~hbf/sfhist.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_science_fiction_films
http://www.filmsite.org/robotsinfilm1.html
http://www.allosphere.ucsb.edu/
http://www.centrifuge.org
http://www.shakti-software.com/Robotics.htm
http://robotporn.de/
http://fogonazos.blogspot.com/2006/12/la-ertica-del-robot_26.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbarella_(film)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forbidden_Planet
http://gizmodo.com/archives/wearable-computing-fashion-show-024397.php
http://webpages.scu.edu/ftp/jkblack/power.html