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 “psychological 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. ‘stay! Speak. Speak. I Charge Thee to Speak’, 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 “new technologies bring the unheimlich ‘other’ 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.�
I’m not as concerned as him about this(!), but he nails the strangeness of being alone and connected all at once.