The following is a couple of paragraphs introducing my paper. I'm curious if anyone else is doing any literary imagery or such? I'm afraid I got a little flowery after the break, I'm wanting it to fit in along with everyone elses. Please leave a short note on the issue. Thank you in advance.
"Code exists all around us. Biological, scientific, physical, political, seasonal, social, housing, military, art, and design. The word conjures many different meanings and translations into the mind. The single underlying idea is that, in code there exists rules and guidelines that outline the limitations and freedoms to a system. These factors force people in these systems to build, bend and struggle to form codes into the world that we see around us. Nowhere in the context of human history has code been more important than today. With the advent of the commercially available Internet in the early 1990’s, human history became universally re-written.
The formation of code became necessary during the height of the cold war. Programmers and directors of missile installations were looking for a more appropriate way to connect staff to computers that, due to their huge size, were required to be isolated in air-conditioned rooms. If a programmer wrote code for a particular procedure, the code would have to be physically carried into the mainframe room and entered by hand. If there were any misprints, typos, or bugs, the data entry staff would have to go back to the programmers and tell them that it didn’t work. Hours and hours were wasted coding and recoding; attempting to set the parameters for the nations’ most devastating array of weaponry.
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Code will build the streets of the cyber city, creating languages, fashions, customs, connecting some users who will meet under flickering street lights and between electronic recycling bins, swapping files and viruses. Encrypted data, classified documents, ideas and evidence will be swapping between hands that have no fingerprints, after which, they will fade away never to resurface. These users might number in the dozens, hundreds, maybe thousands...there's no way to tell, as they share data torrents in servers quietly humming in Sweden, whose very existence is the bane of the NRAA and hundreds of publishing companies.
Others clients will be meeting on gleaming clean streets of monitored sectors like facebook. Shimmering blue and white formatted roads where users are willingly handing over identity, thoughts, feelings and preferences, a veritable stockholders dream. Tracking buying patterns, product marketing...creating the very people it is feeding from. Catching users in an endless feedback loop of shopping and re-creating identities. All the while a staff of bots and people read all the incoming data for "offensive" material, changing the code by force if necessary, verdicts of deletion being handed out fast before the offender has a chance to react."
Thanks again.
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I really like how this is starting out! I'm all for the literary imagery, as for me it evokes feelings and images that tie together the theoretical points you're making and the way we see it manifest in society (kind of like with code itself, how the code dictates how the structure looks and the surface and affects us...neat.)
ReplyDeleteI also liked how you referred to the commercial availability of the internet rewriting human history. This lines up really well with my brief references to code, and how it shapes the medium in which the languages I'm looking at arise. In fact, almost all the things you mentioned code dictating are things that people I've read have referred to as cultural memes.
So I'm assuming you're going to take the ideas here and demonstrate how different types of code led to structures that allowed the shaping of identity, etc....? Really nice how you've shown code as dictating the parameters within which that can happen. Lookin good...i'm excited!