Does not compute (beep)
It’s funny to me how I’ve adopted such a utilitarian view of computers. I expect them to have an immediate, pragmatic Function (yes, capitalized). I give it Data and a Command; it performs an Operation, and I get a Result. Rinse, Repeat. When I first started seeing things like blogs, I thought they were completely useless as a form of information storage and thus merely an exercise in vanity. (umm… ahem…)
And now, there’s this weird, amorphous, non-deterministic, non-algorithmic phenomenon of social networking (see also: Asterisk). It’s got - humans - involved. People put in a set of associations - friends, favorites, goals, and other seemingly trivialities. The computer then spits out the weighted commonalities of associations. The whole conglomeration somehow not only makes sense, but creates something new or inspiring.
How odd! The Result of the Operation is to inspire, to connect people, to create. How very human. My little Turing machine brain is quite perplexed.
This really hit home when a friend of mine introduced me to 43 things. At first I looked at it and thought it was yet another weird, vaguely amusing but ultimately useless social networking experiment. Then, I started playing around with it a bit and it grew on me. I saw fun enjoyable, nonsensical things to try. I was inspired by how simple excuses can be to photograph things. I’ve been trying to start a writing group here in Seattle, and lo, there are people looking for a writing group! I’m a little giddy.
And this is what fascinates this recovering engineer - that these sites have moved beyond merely mechanical computing and have begun to add social and creative phenomena to the system so that when you consider the whole thing - not just the site itself, but the site and the interactions that take place on it - this computing environment becomes much more human. (and, curiously, does not feel at all cyborg-like: we’re adding human to machine, not machine to human).
