Kittler - Alexis, Ramy, Sean

summary?
Kittler start explaining how the future (now) pipes all medias of film, sound and even text through optic cables. how these 3 connected medias are merely storage systems to message we produce as they contain no output method and [can not, in themselves, change the meaning of the messages stored in them]. In consequence only their quality is gauged. These new data storage systems store time. since the past could only store time through textual means. which is why everything ended up in a library. In contrast tribal oral traditions would become extinct, or encapsulated by the, then monopolistic tradition of, writing. writting itself can only store words within the confines of it's 28 letters. The new systems of images and moving images bring about new ways of thinking and remembering. Old ways are replaced, "memory" is replaced with new images instead of hallucinations that would have to be though through words. He later on explains a new division between the media and writing (brought back thanks to the typewritter). Writing now divides itself from the soul and looses it's sensuality. Sensuality now picked up by the media. with this new technologies comes the distinction between the real, the imaginary and the symbolic. the world of the symbolic itself is world of the machine according to Lacan. New terms are introduced again, those of the continuous, as handwriting, and those of discrete, as the typewriter. As ubiquitous digitalization approaches, numbers and figures become the key to all of us.

The second is about programing as an abstraction from the hardware that controls the computers of then and how, when writing code, that writing looses it's meaning because it is so abstracted from it's final interpretation. He goes on to discard software as having any kind of existence outside the hardware that interprets it for which reason it is all the more insisted as being property. without software, we are left with the bare bones of computation, the hardware, at which point efficiency is maximized since there is no abstraction to make it inefficient and wasteful. Kittler writes about having a new type machine, composed entirely of hardware, and that this new machine, confronted with such an increase of signals, now noise, would only fall into perceived chaos and back to Shannon and away from IBM.



ideas

In the first text Kitler seem to share many of the same concerns as McLuhan. Notably in the persistence of recorded in history through written word. The communicative property of history becomes subjugated to the written word. Understandably, but still, bananas. History is currupted by various external sources (external the archival form) most notably, the people who write it. In this sense, our group was more in agreement with the previous text Encoding / Decoding as it better addressed the various sources of manipulation instead of harping on the failure of a medium ( In this case, written words). People still need memory, even with recorded history, we require memory to find history books, or history classes, and definatly, what chapter we where at in the readings. Without memory itself, we would get stuck, reading the same information over and over again, similar to a computer.

Which leads to the second text, "There is no software". Its questionable how serious the statement could be, as its either A: a case of playing with words to validate and communicate a point ( that software is an abstraction that inherits the flaws of language in its inability to represent prevision of process, or rather usefull algorhythms) or B: Frederick Kitler is firmly against abstraction for the aformation weakness in language and beleives that keyboards should be composed of three keys, 0, 1, enter. Scratch that, human computer interaction should be limited to hardware operators modulating freequencies with a screwdriver. Such efficient computation ( as it subverts the computational overhead of... everything ) would lead to modeling of meaningful interaction. Admittedly, the set of problems that are turing complete are infact, a subset of all possible problems, including the interesting and the meaningful. However the abstraction utilised in the creation of programming languages and software is not embded with the failures he describes. As complexity itself takes different forms, or rather the confrontation with complexity, scaling, takes different forms. Beyond performance (the issue that relates most directly to computability) complexity itself scales as it relates to humans. As in, it would take a really long time to program something meaningful modulating signals on a circuit board when the same problem could be solved easily with a programming language. Computability in its binary form, as in, whether something is deterministic and can be computed also suffers from this complexity.


questions

do new systems of data storage, such as film and sound, effect our way of thinking in the same way linguistic determinism does?
If such problems of complexity where solved and a system was constructed to accurately model noise (chaos) or rather, the human realm, would it be recognisable as such by humans?