Kittler response: Charlotte, Charles-Antoine, Jos

Friedrich Kittler describes how the world of symbolics turned into the world of the machine.For him, media are lost in the digital realm; they become numbers, thus transformable into each other through algorithms. However, the monopoly of the digital realm is not a unique case. In order to understand why, we must first understand his notion of media. First of all, media "define what constitutes reality". Media store time in different forms; information is written on or encoded into a media. The act of writing is very old, and since its debut, written languages had to be organized uniformly. The same notion of writing on a media is taken by cinematographs. However, the hallucinatory power of reading and writing is more and more lost or controlled by all lower-level apparatuses. Since most people are unaware of the lower technical levels and can only see the higher levels, they cannot see through the "monopoly of writing". The same concept was understood in "There Is No software": only the lowest level (hardware) really exists. Those who cannot see this hidden level through the higher ones do not understand fully the medium they are using and lose their "hallucinating power".

The IBM measure (logical depth) explains that "the value of a message [is in the apparatus'] buried redundancy." This means that the receiver already has the ability to figure out what the computer does, only at "considerable cost in money, time, or computation." The text also mentions that have become gods in the way that we dictate history through the monopoly of writing. Readers may be inclined to ask if Kittler is implying that software is an example of our laziness, or if he is suggesting that software cannot possibly ever replace us because it is an extension of ourselves i.e. created in our own "image". If this is true, does this mean that software can naturally never help us to do anything besides speed up our own abilities because it is created by us, for us, and with many of our own limitations? Just as the code of stylized hand-writing changes with geographical location, community, teacher, and classroom, software is also programmable. But Kittler writes that "this all-important property of being programmable has, in all evidence, nothing to do with software," as it is apparent in all things, in all skills. This is a confusing statement. The first text is undeniably reminiscent of Benjamin's discussion of the effects of mechanical reproduction because it insists that the craft of handwriting, the soulful experience with the pen and paper, has disappeared with inventions beginning with the typewriter. However, Kittler seems to find the typewriter a less offensive apparatus as it is "something between tool and machine".

Software is simply a way in which people can 'communicate' with sophisticated machines. But is this form of communication an innocent one? Is what Kittler stresses in these texts similar to Baudrillard's concerns? Is he asking readers to recognize the cold hard facts that remain when all else is removed, to understand that our era has become an era of simulation? And in addressing the craft of handwriting, could it not be argued that programming is a soulful form of craft as well, a new kind of poetry (not as a replacement of the 'old' kind, but as a different species)?