The point in Kittler's first essay is to bring forth the point of digitisation erasing all individual media and matching them together. Indeed, it is now possible to mix sound, image and voice together to create a more realistic world in film, whereas sound alone could not be as compelling. And, again, the medium is the message: the content of one medium will be another medium that in turn will have content that is another medium, etc. (e.g. the moving image has sound that has voice and language that was written beforehand). Media created by humans trick us to believe that they stimulate our senses like reality. In fact, mediums are tightly controlled and limited stimuli. It is important not to confuse methods that filter data with our sense perception. Reality is decided on the basis that media stimulates humans accurately. This is how they give meaning to human perception of the world. Media are a vehicle with confined capabilities. This enables a standard to be created. The first of this type is writing. It was the first way to store information in a way that could be easily accessed by others. The author states "This is why anything that ever happened ended up in libraries". This means the only perceivable truth exists in writing, whereas oral truths were considered merely legends. The problem is that these truths are all from the past. It is not possible to read what is currently happening. Therefore, we "read the dead", as in dead events, not necessarily dead authors. Data is organised in such a way as to simulate human perception: it reproduces reality with binary numbers. The title of the text comes from Kittler's concept that the invention of the gramophone, the film and the typewriter represent the first instance of simulating reality and stimulating human senses, namely the ear, the eye and the brain, respectively. It is possible to create media which are as unique as their creator. This is not the purpose. In fact, media must become standard and dividual, a universally accessible truth. Computers will forever be dividual because their creators have made mistakes that will never be changed. The second text proposes that computers hide the act of writing. There is an almost infinite hierarchy of codes that hide what truly happens what happens in the machine that is, at its basis, a passing of electricity. Words are no longer the language of letters, but of mathematical programming and functions, therefore escaping our perception. There is nothing so primitive as the language of the binary: 0 and 1 the passage of electrical current. Software cannot exist without hardware. The ability to program is an attribute of the hardware, not of the software.
On the topic of software, the price manufactures charge for their product is more representative of knowledge placed in the software. We are in a pay-for-service society. This case is no different with software, otherwise we would be paying peanuts for grains of sand. Humans have developed a way to create standards which anyone can understand. This limits what our senses are able to perceive. It would have been preferable to construct a machine which incorporates environmental variables in its operation. This is the principal behind machines which could possess individuality. Company executives used to buy iPods to their kids, then started wanting a similar toy for themselves that would be appropriate in the office environment. The MacBook Air and the iPhone were thus produced to cater to their "needs". This underlines how media technology influences office technology. "Numbers and figures become the key to all creatures" is a very vague phrase and can be interpreted in many different ways: the figures could be the symbols that represent the numbers and the key to the creatures is how we can understand and represent the creatures in an almost mathematical way, with numbers, that become an image. Or, the numbers could be one thing, and the figures are a representation of things in our lives, and the key is the solution that allows a synthesis of these creatures that are in fact us, humans. Perhaps the author discusses a subject that is understood in the programmers' world, but isn't in the regular users' world. But, maybe regular users are starting to assimilate the concept, therefore the subject that might have been very strange when the text was first written could very well be understood nowadays.
Is the human being conscious of the fact that the image that he sees is simply a layer over the underlying code?
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