Literature wanted: what does it feel like to use a computer?
I presume there is literature out there taking a phenomenological view of what using a computer feels like but I am not sure where to start looking. I hope to use it to buttress a hunch I have about why people seem to have trouble in managing public vs private space online. My feeling is that it’s because typing stuff into a computer just doesn’t feel like you’re addressing a large crowd at that moment - it feels like you are talking to yourself (unless you are addressing it to particular named other people who you can then visualise). One can make a similar point about the long life of blog postings. They feel conversational, not like having something published and indexed.
Anyway the only relevant reference I have been able to dredge up from my memory and Endnote database so far is this
Le cahier est inerte, plat, il appartient a la nature inanimee, c’est un fantome de lettre, un ersatz de livre. L’ordinateur a plus de relief et de personnalite, c’est un organisme vivant qui s’allume et s’eteint, vous joue des tours, vous surveille… (LeJeune 2000, p. 20)
(Roughly translated: A notebook is inert, flat and inanimate… The computer has more personality. It is an organism which starts and closes down… and which looks at you.)
Lejeune, P. (2000) “Cher ecran– ” : Journal Personnel, Ordinateur, Internet, Editions du Seuil, Paris.
Can anyone out there point me to some relevant papers or books about this?
September 11th, 2007 at 1:16 pm
We are really following the same path… Turkle has something on the computer screen, I think, and on a new generation thinking of computers as âpsychological machinesâ?. (i.e., interactive and opaque, like the human mind). It’s been a while since I read it, though, I’ll have to look it up.
September 13th, 2007 at 3:48 pm
Rather old, but still wise:
Miller, J. Hillis. âstay! Speak. Speak. I Charge Thee to Speakâ, Culture Machine, 2000. (reviewed 3 February 2005).
From something I wrote an age ago:
Digitally mediated interactions [are] a realm that is generally problematising our understandings of public and private. Literary theorist, J. Hillis Miller gives a somewhat cautionary account of how ânew technologies bring the unheimlich âotherâ into the privacy of the home. They are a frightening threat to traditional ideas of the self as unified and as properly living rooted in one dear particular culture-bound place, participating in a single national culture, firmly protected from any alien otherness. They are threatening also to our assumption that political action is based in a single topographical location, a given nation-state with its firm boundaries, its ethnic and cultural unity.â?
I’m not as concerned as him about this(!), but he nails the strangeness of being alone and connected all at once.