My Mother Was a Computer - Katherine Hayles

This article opens with a great snippet from a novel by Neal Stephenson called Cryptonomicon that illustrates Hayles’ very point that the title of her article, My Mother Was a Computer, has many different meanings.  In the quote, one character refers to a machine that does basic mathematic calculations as a ‘computer’, where the other character answers in saying that computers are humans, as back in the 1930s and 1940s, people with the occupation to do calculations were referred to as computers.  I found this a very clever way to acknowledge the complexity of the title.  Hayles explains how in fact, the majority of people employed to do basic computing were women, and so in a very literal sense, one might actually have a mother who was a Computer, by trade.  From here, she fast forwards into today’s digital age where we can see there has been a “shift from a society in which the intelligence required for calculations was primarily associated with humans to the increasing delegation of these labors to computational machines” (Hayles 1).  Our society today is moving beyond the idea of embodiment of the self within a human ‘container’, which Hayles points out as being a characteristic of our species that has always limited us, into an idea of materiality she defines as marking “a junction between physical reality and human intention” (Hayles 3).  So rather than simply existing in embodiment, we are constructed of material things, or matter, that are of significance to the human race and its development.  As a whole, society runs in the same fashion.  It is not an autonomous human society, but rather one that is made up of necessary materialistic things that work together to make it function smoothly.

Hayles also describes what she terms the Computational Universe such that “the universe is generated through computational processes running on a vast computational mechanism underlying all of physical reality” (Hayles 3). By this she means that reality is always being produced, in such a way that can be compared to that of machine.  This theory can be extended to encompass social and cultural systems as well.  In this argument, one can see the shift from using Mother Nature to explain our reality, to that of a Motherboard within a Universal Computer.  This change in analogy really caught my attention and I feel was well executed in this article.  As children are brought up more and more dependent upon technology, their understanding of the world around them will inevitably change.  Where upbringings of generations passed have focused on using the biological physical reality to explain one’s place in society and the planet as a whole, newer generations have a new view of what is “natural” and so do not have the concept of Mother Nature as their underlying social or cultural behaviors.  My grandfather finds using a compass as being “second nature” in that very little thought has to go in to it.  He watches me type on my laptop or surf the Internet, finding information in seconds, and is boggled by it all.  He grew up in a world completely different than the world I grew up in 60 years later.  The Internet and computer technologies come as “second nature” to me as a direct relation to the world in which I grew up.  And generations younger than myself are even more technically savvy at an even earlier age than I was.

This leads into Hayles’ next point in that the title of her article could refer to the change in what is associated with oral and written text.  With the advancement of instant messaging technologies, video games, and the Internet as a whole, “the mother’s voice that haunted reading has been supplanted by another set of stimuli: the visual, audio, kinesthetic, and haptic cues emanating from the computer” (Hayles 4).  Ultimately, she is pointing out that we have shifted from associating the mother’s voice with writing to a mentality where “the computer’s beeps, clicks, and tones are the links connecting contemporary subjectivities to electronic environments” (Hayles 4), reinforcing her idea of the Computational Universe.  So in this sense, our “mother” – or mothering voice – has become a computer.

When first reading the title of this article, my mind went straight to artificial intelligence, where a robot or computer program may envision its mother to be a computer.  Hayles talks about this and how the anthropomorphic projection that is being created gives false ideas of computers functioning as human beings. It “brings into question the extent to which human beings can be understood as computer programs” (Hayles 5).  How we view of ourselves; how we think and feel about the world and its inhabitants, both human and non-human, has changed.  There has been a shift from humans as being the centre of all knowledge, in such that we now share that crown with the non-human.

I find it relatively easy to connect with Hayles in her thoughts on technology.  I can see where she is coming from and agree with her different interpretations of the phrase “my mother was a computer”.  On page 6 she contrasts narrative and simulations, and I can see the tension between the two in today’s society. Simulations are so closely associated with posthumanistic ideologies and narratives associated with social and cultural systems. The tension builds a divide between the calculations required in the processes that make up the material world of today, and the ‘human lifeworld’ that seems more natural to human behavior.  My question to fellow classmates is...

Do you agree with Hayles’ shift in thought over the 5 years between her two articles we studied in this course?  Is she just in saying that “the interplay between the liberal humanist subject and the posthuman that [Hayles] used to launch [her] analysis in How We Became Posthuman has already begun to fade into the history of the twentieth century”(Hayles 2)?

Check out the links below for some supplemental information on Katherine Hayles as well as the idea of posthumanism.  I found them to be quite interesting.  Wikipedia gives a good briefing of Hayles, outlining her many literary accomplishments.

Bosttom, Nick. “Technological Revolutions: Ethics and Policy in the Dark” Nanoscale: Issues and Perspectives for the Nano Century (2007): 129-52. Print.  2006 online. 28 March 2011. <www.nickbostrom.com/revolutions.pdf>

Hayles, N. Katherine. “Prologue: Computing Kin.” My Mother was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2005. 1-7 and 245. (CanCopy Course Kit).

“Our Future as Posthumans” . YouTube.com. 20 May 2008. 28 March 2011. <www.youtube.com/watch?v=LYDs5SCSZDU>

Wikipedia. “N. Katherine Hayles.” Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. 4 Dec. 2010. Web. 29 March 2011. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N._Katherine_Hayles#Books>.