Glitches
Posted by on Friday, January 27th, 2012 at 9:00 amI’m thinking of my “favorite aspect of technology” in terms of later class discussion and the syllabus in general, primarily the definition of technology—whether it must be utilitarian and whether it can have agency.
It seems to me that the “glitches” I enjoy might appeal to me because they make the machine feel fallible and therefore human. Mixing up people’s pictures, mis-guessing the next word—those are things I might do. And it’s pretty human to sympathize with a consciousness that feels to be “like me.” And there it is–these mistakes make me recognize technology as a consciousness. And it makes me giggle! Humor after all, seems to be a mix of that which is delightful and that which is terrifying. It’s like the uncanny. The familiar and the unfamiliar, in the same space. The shiver, or laugh, seems to emanate from the inability to understand which one is covering the other—which is the real and which is the costume. Is the technological consciousness friendly and familiar? Or is it taking over? (Could the takeover be parental or for our own good, as suggested by Brautigan? I feel the shiver/giggle again at that idea, which seems to repeat the same uncanny trick.)
And now that Freud is brought into my ramblings, I can talk about the other effect of those charmingly frightening glitches. Regarding a human consciousness, we tend to believe that slip-ups reveal truth. Whether we learned the technique directly from Freud, from popular culture’s appropriation of his ideas, or whether the instinct is much older than either, we tend to watch for the subconscious to poke through and reveal the great truth of who we are. In this way, a computer glitch becomes the technological subconscious poking out at me.
I mentioned in class that I was delighted by the way my iPhone mixes up my friend’s pictures. It’s funny because it’s silly. It’s funny because it brings technology down to a human level. And it’s terrifying because it brings human beings down to the level of the machine. This happens because of the recognition of consciousness in what I want to be only a tool. (I see the errors as more evidence of human-like consciousness, by the way, than a computer’s common trick of, say, computing.)
In the particular glitch I mentioned, the slip up goes further. It tells me that the computer can’t tell people apart. It mixes us up! We are numbers or objects to the brain that we have built. So as I recognize a frightening humanity in the machine, I know that it does not recognize mine.
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You might be interested in the work of Stacia Yeapanis (I thought of her when you mentioned glitches). She is a Chicago artist who did a project titled “My Life as a Sim,” in which she would play the computer game Sim City and collect screen captures of the glitches that would happen to her character. You can find that project here: http://staciayeapanis.com/section/141520_My_Life_as_a_Sim_2005_2007.html
This makes me think of predictive texting mistakes–there’s a recent meme where people create fake images of text message threads containing a joke hinging on human-created “computer-generated” slip-ups (we’re imitating machines). I’m also thinking of digital games where a glitch becomes part of the challenge (e.g. Pac Man; is the machine a collaborator with the game’s human creator?).
Allie’s fascination with glitches immediately put me into mind of what Amanda semi-referenced above. Well, specifically, this site that I stumbled on through FB a few weeks ago: http://damnyouautocorrect.com/13603/the-25-funniest-autocorrects-of-dyacs-first-year/. Definitely humorous and giggle-prompting, but I’m not convinced these glitches are acts of a technological consciousness. Not having a smartphone of my own, my initial thought is that many of these “glitches” are really commonly-used words (habitually selected by human operators) being incorrectly “plugged” into conversations without immediate notice (by human operators). In that scenario, Autocorrect is a misused tool, a conduit of words both generated and allowed (through negligence) by humans. While such detection of personal colloquialisms toes the line in privacy issues (is anyone NOT disconcerted by Gmail ads that read like a compendium of your week in email?), it’s true that the technology patterns itself after its operators, at the very least ‘learning’ not to offer commonly rejected suggestions.
Briefly researching Autocorrect’s limitations, I landed on this article: http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2010/07/yes_ill_matty_you.html. I think it’s interesting that the author writes in defense of not only the programmers (and their “thankless” jobs), but of the software itself. He projects an image of a poor, under-appreciated employee who, “overwhelmed by your errors, makes a mistake of its own.” In this he assigns agency to the technology, while continuously referencing the human software developers who are working to advance autocorrection intelligence. A bit of line-blurring can be attributed to the author’s pathos (his “Aw, give the phone a break, guys!” lead-in), but the second page contains a haunting declaration: “As phones get faster and can store larger dictionaries, their autocorrection systems will be able to take a deeper, more meaningful look at your sentence before offering a word choice.” A piece of technology able to make deeper inferences and interpret/project meaning within the innocuous realm of texting? Suddenly, the erasure of giggle-inducing goofs leaves one prone to shivers.
Speaking of the haunting nature of technology, this morning I was looking at an outlet and trying to discern what all was plugged into my outlet by my bed. As I was doing this, I realized I was unable to figure out what all the cords went to. I stared at my nightstand, confirmed that my lamp was one of the two things plugged in and was still unsure of what the second cord went to. Suddenly, I realized that it was my alarm clock. I had just been staring at it, but I failed to really see as technology. It blended in and was just another object junking up my nightstand. Technology has pervaded our lives in so many ways that the line between “natural” and “technology” has been blurred. The gmail recommendations that come straight from our email accounts appear “natural” and helpful rather than invasive. It’s just interesting to think about how much technology has infiltrated our lives to the point even where we fail to recognize it. It just blends in. So, that leaves me with the question of whether technology is an addition or is it a completion? Does abstaining from using technology like the Amish make us more “real” or “natural” or is it simply denying the fact that everything is simulation and we can no longer access the “real”?