Why the Hell would people want a computer in their home?
I think a number of great ideas have circulated with this week's texts, and I will try to elaborate on more than one in this brief commentary. I will admit that kluitenberg's article was gripping for myself, because I like the archaeological approach to technological artifacts.
I think back to a chapter by Trevor Pinch and Wiebe Bijker, which looks at the evolution of the bicycle. So while the bicycle isn't exactly a medium, other discourses do push for the merger of communication and transportation, so I feel a brief synopsis here is justified. Early bicycle models consisted of the big front wheel and the tiny rear wheel, AKA Penny-farthing's. The problem was, many people weren't tall enough to ride the things and a woman in a dress most certainly couldn't mount one. Secondly, they were dangerous; Think about being that high off the ground on wooden wheels over cobblestone streets. So social forces began pushing for redesigns of the bicycle: The front wheel began shrinking, the rear wheels grew, a frame resembling that of today's contraptions emerged. A number of heroic men however though this saftey-ing of the bicycle was balderdash though. The big front wheel got, well bigger. This didn't last though. The most interesting segment of this long narrative was the introduction of pneumatic rubber tires. People roared with laughter at the bicycle, claiming the technology would never catch on. The rubber tires won its first sanctioned race and was later black-boxed.
I think this chapter demonstrates a proper archaeological approach to a technology, versus our current understanding of the bike moving from the Penny-farthing to the current state somewhere in time.
Corresponding to this post's title, the computer itself was not immediately recognized as a viable technology for personal use. People scoffed at the idea of people having their own computers. Why would they want them, they really don't serve much use. Not to mention, in the era of vacuum tubes and punch cards, computers were the size of garages. it would be decades later, with the emergence of transistors and proper software that computers were deemed viable as a public commodity. I could give many intimate details, but let's consider the mouse. It was developed midway through the 20th century as a military artifact. Later designs in the 1960s changed its shape from a trackball to a mouse proper. Xerox had their own design they wanted to used with their Alto computer. Apple appropriated the design into their own computers, seeing its usefulness in their operating system. So the mouse wasn't just born the mouse for the computer, but in fact was eventually integrated as a peripheral for personal computing.
As Kluitenberg says, media archaeology is a "method of constructing a diversified historical apprehension of media technology cultures by uncovering material lineages of apparatuses." (P.42)
I think the former examples elaborate on this point.
I'm trying to wrap my head around the idea of technology also shaping people, but I think I can, at least, try to appropriate these examples into it. For the bicycle, I think while the technology was adjusted to human dimensions, people did have to adjust themselves to this new mode of transportation. Humans may inevitably learn to walk, but we aren't wired to ride a bicycle without tumbling a few times. Consider the city of today too. Traffic is squashed aside to bicycle lanes (quite possibly the most idiotically unsafe idea in a while) to accomidate for riders. A regulatory infrastructure has also been created to prevent riders' usage of sidewalks. Etc. Etc.
Now, look at human behaviour with the advent of ubiquitous computing. No, I'm not going to relinguish myself to talking about this 'need for connectivity'. The point is, computers operate on a certain'language', which differs from that of human language. With Huhtamo and parikka's article, they speak of electromagnetic media and that of computer hardware and more. Humans aren't just translating what is emanated from a monitor into human data, but human communicative practices really are assimilating to those of the computer. At times, it's just easy enough to tell the computer what to do in C++ or HTML. Google searches are another good example. I'm not going to search for 'the Scuderia Italia Lola F1 car from 1993', when i could just search 1993 Lola Scuderia Italia F1. In this interaction with the computer's algorhithmic methods, we kiss goodbye normal linguistic structure for ones the computer can utilize to find what we want more effectively. But the computer isn't getting any better at our language, is it?
