We live in a world, according to N. Katherine Hayles, where new
languages are constantly emerging, proliferating, and fading into
obsolescence. These are languages of our own making: the programming
languages written in code for the intelligent machines we call
computers. Hayles's latest exploration provides an exciting new way of
understanding the relations between code and language and considers how
their interactions have affected creative, technological, and artistic
practices.
My Mother Was a Computer explores how the impact of code on everyday
life has become comparable to that of speech and writing: language and
code have grown more entangled, the lines that once separated humans
from machines, analog from digital, and old technologies from new ones
have become blurred. My Mother Was a Computer gives us the tools
necessary to make sense of these complex relationships. Hayles argues
that we live in an age of intermediation that challenges our ideas
about language, subjectivity, literary objects, and textuality. This
process of intermediation takes place where digital media interact with
cultural practices associated with older media, and here Hayles sharply
portrays such interactions: how code differs from speech; how electronic
text differs from print; the effects of digital media on the idea of the
self; the effects of digitality on printed books; our conceptions of
computers as living beings; the possibility that human consciousness
itself might be computational; and the subjective cosmology wherein
humans see the universe through the lens of their own digital age.
We are the children of computers in more than one sense, and no critic
has done more than N. Katherine Hayles to explain how these technologies
define us and our culture. Heady and provocative, My Mother Was a
Computer will be judged as her best work yet.
