The current text of choice is The Social Life of Information by John Seely Brown and Paul Deguid. I picked it up at the recommendation of previous students of the School of Information bc I thought I was a bit lacking in tech knowledge -- and this book focuses on how recent technology relates to society, which is always a subject I'm interested in (society, I mean).
Anyway, what I find particularly fascinating about this book is what it reveals about this particular subset of society: those who deal with computers, who design programs. There seems to be an implicit belief in the rationality and in the strict rules that govern computer-centered structures.
Ex: in Ch. 2 entitled "Agents and Angels" (why the impulse to give good/evil values to objects that have no knowledge of such distinctions?), the authors speak of the "antisocial bots" that go around deleting emails, spamming sites, spying on users, attacking websites until they crash.
Okay, I can understand that this is highly disruptive behavior. But the authors seem to have an unrational horror of this sort of behavior, something that goes beyond mere annoyance at having their work undone. And it seems to me, that this horror is related to the dominant impulse of human philosophy and logic-centered behavior throughout the ages. We are primarily an unstable breed of animals, acting on our impulses, our emotions and our biological drives. But we abhor this aspect of ourselves and desire to repress the illogical for the beautiful symmetry of reason, rational, and logic because it would indicate our control of an unstable world that teases us and taunts us and destroys us at will.
Ex: critical theory in the last century and a half (when did Saussure live?) has shown that our society is dominated by rules and structures that seek to establish an overriding order onto our society. Anyone that acts outside the established rules is automatically shunned from the society or punished in an (in)appropriate manner.
But yet, if we allow Rationality to Reign and if we begin to mimic the ways of the machines we have created, we are enabling the loss of everything that makes our human existence beautiful and exciting: intuition, art, creativity, chance. We become no more than an ordered system that functions without error and without deviation. Okay, I understand that some ppl find this vision beautiful and desirable. But not me. I've always had a liking for anarchist elements, for the moments of chaos that disrupt our society. It's necessary. It allows us to learn, to grow, to become experienced.
Even Brown and Deguid unconsciously acknowledge this, slipping up and writing after a generalized description of the destructive bots: "As rapidly as the diligent bots find ways to see through their ruses and overcome these tactics, others find new ways to produce mayhem." They are aware that their "good" bots become more efficient, more advanced through interactions with the "bad" bots.This is why I'm fascinated by human sexuality -- especially deviations in "normal" human sexuality. The sex drive is the most disruptive element within each of us. Some of us manage to repress it more than others, but no one can manage to escape it. It shakes us up out of our dreams of order and rationality -- dreams that are fueled by our need to control our entire universe (the quest for knowledge also can be classified as an attempt to control. We think if we know how it functions, then we can control the functions.)
Anyway, this is why it's good to add a little variety to one's reading list. Even tho it has still come back to the same subject that has absorbed my attention for the last year. Ah well...we can never escape our biology.
Thus endeth the lesson.
