1. Instructor's Introduction
2. Student Presentation: Gisela Kommerell
3. A hypertext of materials that may be useful for class discussion

• Supplementary Resources for Class
• Other Works That May Be Mentioned in Class ( = especially recommended)
  
  • General Works:
    • Manuel Castells, The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, 3 vols. (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 1996-97), especially vol. I: 40-47, 60-65, 246-47
    • Alan Liu, Voice of the Shuttle: Cyberculture Page: History of Computing & Computer Museums
  • Development of the Computer:
    • Martin Campbell-Kelly and William Aspray, Computer: A History of the Information Machine (New York: BasicBooks / HarperCollins, 1996)
    • Paul E. Ceruzzi, A History of Modern Computing (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1998)
    • Herman H. Goldstine, The Computer from Pascal to von Neumann (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1993)
    • Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon, Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996)
    • Ken Polsson, Chronology of Events in the History of Microcomputers
    • Robert H'obbes' Zakon, Hobbes Internet Timeline 4.2
    • Stephen Segaller, Nerds 2.0.1: A Brief History of the Internet (New York: TV Books, 1998)
  • History of Computing in the Workplace:
    • William H. Davidow and Michael S. Malone, The Virtual Corporation: Structuring and Revitalizing the Corporation for the 21st Century (New York: HarperBusiness / HarperCollins, 1992)
    • Joan Greenbaum, Windows on the Workplace: Computers, Jobs, and the Organization of Office Work in the Late Twentieth Century (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1995)
    • Robert E. Kraut, ed., Technology and the Transformation of White-Collar Work (Hillsdale, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1987), especially:
      • James H. Bair, "User Needs for Office Systems Solutions," pp. 177-94
      • Tora K. Bikson, "Understanding the Implementation of Office Technology," pp. 155-76
      • Roslyn L. Feldberg and Evelyn Nakano Glenn, "Technology and the Transformation of Clerical Work," pp. 77-98
    • Gene I. Rochlin, Trapped in the Net: The Unanticipated Consequences of Computerization (Princeton: Princeton U. Press, 1997)
    • Richard S. Rosenberg, The Social Impact of Computers, 2nd ed. (San Diego, Calif.: Academic, 1997)
    • Shoshana Zuboff, In the Age of the Smart Machine: The Future of Work and Power (New York: Basic Books, 1988)
  • The Cultural Context of the Mainframe:
    • C. Wright Mills, White Collar: The American Middle Classes (New York: 1951; rpt. Galaxy, 1956)
    • Willam H. Whyte, Jr., The Organization Man (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1956)
  • Representations of the Mainframe in the Arts, Humanities, Cultural Studies:
    
    • Colossus: The Forbin Project (1969)
    • Mark Poster, The Second Media Age (Cambridge: Polity, 1995), p. 86: "The population is now cognizant of being surveilled constantly by databases and it apparently feels ill at ease as a result. Database anxiety has not of yet developed into an issue of national political prominence but it is clearly a growing concern of many and bespeaks a new level of what Foucault calls the normalization of the population" (Poster is discussing the database as "super-panopticon")

Colussus (aka Panopticon): This class reviews the history of twentieth-century computing to define the mainframe paradigm that dominated from the 1950's through 1970's, and so prepares us to understand the transition to the subsequent network paradigm. Teaser question: why was the Post-It™ note such a successful invention at the height of the mainframe age?

A Short History of Information Technology in the 20th Century (includes some material from Alan Liu, The Laws of Cool: The Cultural Life of Information, work-in-progress under contract with Stanford Univ. Press)

• Progenitor Developments
  • Early to Mid 19th Century: Charles Babbage and the Difference and Analytical Engines
  • Early 19th Century: the Jacquard Loom and the punch-card system
  • 1880-1911: Herman Hollerith, the Tabulating Machine Company (later IBM), and automated punch-card calculation
  • 1935-43: Early computers, e.g., the IBM Harvard Mark I
• World War II to 1952
  • ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer), EDVAC, John von Neumann, and the stored program ("memory") concept (invention of the modern computer architecture)
  • Alan Turing and the Bletchley Park military cryptography center in England (automated code-breaking machinery)
  • Post-war commercial computer development: UNIVAC, IBM's CPC (Card-Programmed Calculator)
• The Mainframe Era: Late 1950's to late 1970's (Shoshanna Zuboff: the "informating" era)
  • 1959: IBM Model 1401 with "chain" printer (IBM estimated sales of about 1,000 machines; 12,000 eventually sold to businesses)
  • 1964: IBM System/360
    
    Instructor's Commentary on the Mainframe Era:
    
    Mainframe computers (under whose rubric I also include minicomputers) entered the workplace in a series of overlapping stages from the late 50s on. After many of the largest companies first adopted computers in their routine work in the 50s and 60s, computerization broadened across the range of industries and firms until by the mid 70s all major industrial sectors were reporting expenses for data-processing (Feldberg and Glenn, pp. 79-80). First to be computerized "were complex numerical tasks such as actuarial analysis, mortality studies, and valuation of reserves"; next "large volume, standardized calculations that had previously involved large numbers of clerks" (e.g., billing); then centralized record-keeping in the form of databases (Feldberg and Glenn, p. 80; Castells, Information Age, I: 246); and finally, in the 70s, word processing (Bair, p. 180). By the early 80s, as shown by the field-research of Bikson and her team, 64 to 81 percent of workers in every U.S. white-collar rank from the secretarial up to the professional-managerial were using computers; and even 36 percent of executives spent time at the keyboard (see Bikson's table, p. 159; see also Zuboff, pp. 415-22).
    
    

    The Mainframe Paradigm: Hardware: central computer, dumb terminals Software: "vertical" applications Theater of Operation: the "vertically-integrated" company Typical Social Organization: MIS Departments (Management Information Services), data-entry clerical pools Typical Applications: CNC (Computer Numerically Controlled) manufacturing, database record-keeping (see Shoshana Zuboff on "informating")

    
    
  • Representations of the mainframe in the arts, humanities, cultural studies:
    
    • Colossus: The Forbin Project (1969)
    • Mark Poster, The Second Media Age (Cambridge: Polity, 1995), p. 86: "The population is now cognizant of being surveilled constantly by databases and it apparently feels ill at ease as a result. Database anxiety has not of yet developed into an issue of national political prominence but it is clearly a growing concern of many and bespeaks a new level of what Foucault calls the normalization of the population" (Poster is discussing the database as "super-panopticon")
    • Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1979)
    • Jeremy Bentham, The Works of Jeremy Bentham, vol. 4 (Edinburgh: William Tait, 1843) (on the Panopticon)
    • Other Works Mentioned in Class: C. Wright Mills, White Collar: The American Middle Classes (New York: 1951; rpt. Galaxy, 1956); Willam H. Whyte, Jr., The Organization Man (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1956)

Our organizing topic in understanding the mainframe age is the successor to both the paradigms of communicating and mediating: "interfacing" (which will eventually also incorporate "personal computing" and "networking"). Our general questions will be: what was the experience of the interface in the age of the mainframe computer? How does that experience change in the personal computer/network age? And how does contemporary "interface culture" (as Steven Johnson terms it) not only recapitulate communicating and mediating but extend these acts of information in new directions?

Excerpt from the presentation:

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Question or challenge posed during the presentation:

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• Martin Heidegger, "The Age of the World Picture"
  • The Modern World Picture
  • The Modern Subject
  • The Modern Anthropology
  • "The Conquest of the World as Picture"
  • "The Incalculable"
• Albert Borgmann, "Transparency and Control," in Holding On To Reality
  • Technological Information: Three Definitions
    • From the Point of View of Literacy
    • From the Point of View of Machinery
    • From the Point of View of Visualization
  • Eye-Max: Information as Omni-Vision
  • The Shadows of Transparency
• Shoshana Zuboff, In the Age of the Smart Machine: The Future of Work and Power
  • Zuboff on "Informating" and "Overview"
  • Interviews with Employees and Managers:
    • "We'll be able to see what's happening"
    • "Helicopter view"
    • "Look at the Whole"
    • "The more I learn theoretically, the more I can see in the information"
    • "If I had known what was going on, if I had had a clear picture of it . . ."
    • "It gets worse in that the technology lets you look down that data tunnel at lightening speed—then the tunnel turns into a dot"
    • "I can't see my men in the field now, because I look through the computer"
• Thought Experiments in the "Vision" of Information

Instructor's Preliminary Questions

Is Heidegger right about the modernity of the "world picture"?

What about the early modern period? (a, b, c, d)

When does "modern" begin?

The World Picture does not seem to have anything to do with communication (it's a very lonely world that Heidegger paints). Is the World Picture the same as "media," however?

Is there a "back stage" to the World Picture?

Whatever does Heidegger mean by the "incalculable"?

The World Picture is a representation of the world to vision. What is "reflection" as Heidegger uses the term in his discussion of the incalculable, and how is reflection related to vision?

Is GIS as exampled by Borgmann an example of Heidegger's World Picture? (Cf., medical imaging)

What is the relation between Borgmann's "transparency" and Heidegger's "reflection"? Compare also Zuboff's "reflection."

So, what does information "look" like?

1. Martin Heidegger, "The Age of the World Picture" (from The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays [New York: Harper & Row, 1977], rpt. in Timothy Druckery, ed., Electronic Culture: Technology and Visual Representation [New York: Aperture, 1996])

(excerpts selected and titled by instructor of this course)

The Modern World Picture

        With the word "picture" we think first of all of a copy of something. Accordingly, the world picture would be a painting, so to speak, of what is as a whole. But "world picture" means more than this. We mean by it the world itself, the world as such, what is, in its entirety, just as it is normative and binding for us. "Picture" here does not mean some imitation, but rather what sounds forth in the colloquial expression, "We get the picture" [literally, we are in the picture] concerning something. This means the matter stands before us exactly as it stands with it for us. "To get into the picture" [literally, to put oneself into the picture] with respect to something means to set whatever it is, itself, in place before oneself just in the way that it stands with it, and to have it fixedly before oneself as set up in this way. But a decisive determinant in the essence of the picture is still missing. "We get the picture" concerning something does not mean only that what is, is set before us, is represented to us, in general, but that what is stands before us—in all that belongs to it and all that stands together in it—as a system. "To get the picture" throbs with being acquainted with something, with being equipped and prepared for it. Where the world becomes picture, what is, in its entirety, is juxtaposed as that for which man is prepared and which, correspondingly, he therefore intends to bring before himself and have before himself, and consequently intends in a decisive sense to set in place before himself. Hence world picture, when understood essentially, does not mean a picture of the world but the world conceived and grasped as picture. What is, in its entirety, is now taken in such a way that it first is in being and only is in being to the extent that it is set up by man, who represents and sets forth. Wherever we have the world picture, an essential decision takes place regarding what is, in its entirety. The Being of whatever is, is sought and found in the representedness of the latter. (p. 56)

The Modern Subject

        In distinction from Greek apprehending, modern representing, whose meaning the word repraesentatio first brings to its earliest expression, intends something quite different. Here to represent [vor-stellen] means to bring what is present at hand [das Vorhandene] before oneself as something standing over against, to relate it to oneself, to the one representing it, and to force it back into this relationship to oneself as the normative realm. Wherever this happens, man "gets into the picture" in precedence over whatever is. But in that man puts himself into the picture in this way, he puts himself into the scene, i.e., into the open sphere of that which is generally and publicly represented. Therewith man sets himself up as the setting in which whatever is must henceforth set itself forth, must present itself [sich . . . präsentieren], i.e., be picture. Man becomes the representative [der Repräsentant] of that which is, in the sense of that which has the character of object.
        But the newness in this event by no means consists in the fact that now the position of man in the midst of what is, is an entirely different one in contrast to that of medieval and ancient man. What is decisive is that man himself expressly takes up this position as one constituted by himself, that he intentionally maintains it as that taken up by himself, and that he makes it secure as the solid footing for a possible development of humanity. Now for the first time is there any such thing as a "position" of man. Man makes depend upon himself the way in which he must take his stand in relation to whatever is as the objective. There begins that way of being human which mans the realm of human capability as a domain given over to measuring and executing, for the purpose of gaining mastery over that which is as a whole. The age that is determined from out of this event is, when viewed in retrospect, not only a new one in contrast with the one that is past, but it settles itself firmly in place expressly as the new. To be new is peculiar to the world that has become picture.
        When, accordingly, the picture character of the world is made clear as the representedness of that which is, then in order fully to grasp the modern essence of representedness we must track out and expose the original naming power of the worn-out word and concept "to represent" [vorstellen]: to set out before oneself and to set forth in relation to oneself. Through this, whatever is comes to a stand as object and in that way alone receives the seal of Being. That the world becomes picture is one and the same event with the event of man's becoming subiectum in the midst of that which is. (pp. 57-58)

The Modern Anthropology

        The interweaving of these two events, which for the modern age is decisive—that the world is transformed into picture and man into subiectum—throws light at the same time on the grounding event of modern history, an event that at first glance seems almost absurd. Namely, the more extensively and the more effectually the world stands at man's disposal as conquered, and the more objectively the object appears, all the more subjectively, i.e., the more importunately, does the subiectum rise up, and all the more impetuously, too, do observation of and teaching about the world change into a doctrine of man, into anthropology. (pp. 58-59)

"The Conquest of the World as Picture"

        The fundamental event of the modern age is the conquest of the world as picture. The word "picture" [Bild] now means the structured image [Gebild] that is the creature of man's producing which represents and sets before. In such producing, man contends for the position in which he can be that particular being who gives the measure and draws up the guidelines for everything that is. Because this position secures, organizes, and articulates itself as a world view, the modern relationship to that which is, is one that becomes, in its decisive unfolding, a confrontation of world views; and indeed not of random world views, but only of those that have already taken up the fundamental position of man that is most extreme, and have done so with the utmost resoluteness. For the sake of this struggle of world views and in keeping with its meaning, man brings into play his unlimited power for the calculating, planning, and molding of all things. (pp. 59-60)

"The Incalculable"

        The gigantic is rather that through which the quantitative becomes a special quality and thus a remarkable kind of greatness. Each historical age is not only great in a distinctive way in contrast to others; it also has, in each instance, its own concept of greatness. But as soon as the gigantic in planning and calculating and adjusting and making secure shifts over out of the quantitative and becomes a special quality, then what is gigantic, and what can seemingly always be calculated completely, becomes, precisely through this, incalculable. This becoming incalculable remains the invisible shadow that is cast around all tbings everywhere when man has been transformed into subiectum and the world into picture.
        By means of this shadow the modern world extends itself out into a space withdrawn from representation and so lends to the incalculable the determinateness peculiar to it, as well as a historical uniqueness. This shadow, however, points to something else, which is denied to us of today to know. But man will never be able to experience and ponder this that is denied so long as he dawdles about in the mere negating of the age. The flight into tradition, out of a combination of humility and presumption, can bring about nothing in itself other than self-deception and blindness in relation to the historical moment.
        Man will know, i.e., carefully safeguard into its truth, that which is incalculable, only in creative questioning and shaping out of the power of genuine reflection. Reflection transports the man of the future into that "between" in which he belongs to Being and yet remains a stranger amid that which is. Holderlin knew of this. His poem, which bears the superscrition "To the Germans," closes:

How narrowly bounded is our lifetime,
We see and count the number of our years.
But have the years of nations
Been seen by mortal eye?

If your soul throbs in longing
Over its own time, mourning, then
You linger on the cold shore
Among your own and never know them.         (pp. 60-61)

Technological Information: A Definition From the Point of View of Literacy

Technological information could simply be defined as the object of information technology. But we can be more explicit and define it structurally as the information that is measured in bits, ordered by Boolean algebra, and conveyed by electrons. It has a plausible claim to representing the fundamental and universal alphabet and grammar of information. (p. 166)

Technological Information: A Definition From the Point of View of Machinery

[ . . . ] digital rigor, the massive logic and data structures, and the rapid processing of technological information.
        None of the "pretechnological" kinds of information combined all three features. (p. 167)

Technological Information: A Definition From the Point of View of Visualization

The genius of information technology consists in making information pliable by digitizing it, making it abundantly available by collecting and storing astronomical amounts of it, and putting it at our disposal through powerful processing and display devices. (pp. 170-71)

Eye-Max Theater: Information as Omni-Vision

Technological information can reveal otherwise invisible things not only on and above the earth, but beneath the earth as well. The very rock and soil of a stretch of north-central Montana has been made transparent by a computer model of the geology under the Rabbit Hills oil field. The model represents an "integration of 3-dimensional seismic data, geologic and engineering models that accommodate variations of physical scale and relative emphasis of data, and finally a visualization of the integrated model set" (see fig. 18). The model consists of six or so colored and layered surfaces that represent the strata of this area, and it allows you to fly through this layered space to reach different viewpoints and perspectives on where, for example, the shafts of the oil wells penetrate and terminate in the layers of sand and rock. [Cf., DOE Petroleum Reservoir Characterization Project, Geological Images from U. Montana Computer Science Dept.]
       [ . . . ] And finally, the areas of physical concreteness and social actuality are not the only ones where turbidity of information limits our view. The realms of scientific abstraction and mathematical possibility can be clouded by a surfeit of data or complexity of structure. Visualization is the device that renders such problems transparent. (p. 172)

        Transparency of information would approach perfection if all information about reality could be united in one well-ordered information space, realizing electronically the Memory Theater that Giulio Camillo conceived in the sixteenth century. His idea was to order all knowledge in a carefully arranged fan shape. "He pretends," a contemporary observer noted, "that all things that the human mind can conceive and which we cannot see with the corporeal eye, after being collected together by diligent meditation may be expressed by certain corporeal signs in such a way that the beholder may at once perceive with his eyes everything that is otherwise hidden in the depths of the human mind. And it is because of this corporeal looking that he calls it a theatre." Today's prototype of such a space, the Internet (or, more vaguely, cyberspace) is far from all inclusive and well structured. But Camillo's encyclopedic ambition survives in today's notions of spatial navigation, hyperlinking, and search engines." (p. 175)

The Shadows of Transparency

To this hierarchy of boxes, extending from the transistor to the computer, there roughly corresponds a hierarchy of languages. The one that uses the vocabulary of bits and the grammar of Boolean algebra is closest to the physical structure of the machine and is called machine language. Pieces and processes of the machine language are gathered into the terms and operations of the assembly language whereon is layered the compiler language, the programming language, and so on. just as for the common user the physical structures of the computer have coalesced and become opaque in a box, so the languages of the computer have congealed into the lingua franca of point and click. (pp. 167-68)

Transparency, however, is anything but transparent and casts its own shadows of enigma and confusion. Edward Tufte, who has worked hard to promote high standards for the graphic visualization of information, concludes that principles of good design "are not logically or mathematically certain" and that most of them "should be greeted with some skepticism." (p. 175)

This dimming of transparency occurs at the operational level of technological information where scientists use high-level computer languages, computer graphics, and software packages. But even where clarity reigns at this stratum, it rests on a substratum of machinery that is becoming concealed from the understanding of those who operate on its surface." The blackboxing that is the consequence of progress in information technology encloses ever larger spaces of hardware and software. It is an unavoidable development. (p. 176)

Transparency as a norm of clarity and presentation, however, has no intrinsic points of rest or satisfaction. On a bad day in winter the air in the Missoula valley is anything but transparent and dims the outlines of the hills and mountains. Air pollution impairs visibility. But the level and extent of pollution are themselves unclear until you climb one of the nearby mountains and see bow the brownish smog fills the valley and is lapping up the hillsides as Lake Missoula did in the last ice age. Thus from high above something can present itself clearly that from the valley bottom is an obstacle to clarity.
        If you imagine yourself in control of a perfect GIS, nothing any longer presents itself with any authority. Anything might as well be an impediment to inquiry. Pollution obscures the vegetation, vegetation hides the soils, the soils conceal the geology, the geology obstructs a view of the magnetic field. And all the information about the physical makeup of the globe may be thought of as getting in the way of social reality, the latter as crowding out information about the arts and sciences, and so on. (p. 177)

2. Shoshana Zuboff: In the Age of the Smart Machine: The Future of Work and Power (1988) (excerpts selected and titled by instructor of this course)

• Informating and Overview
• Interviews with Employees and Managers:
  1. "We'll be able to see what's happening"
  2. "Helicopter view"
  3. "Look at the Whole"
  4. "The more I learn theoretically, the more I can see in the information"
  5. "If I had known what was going on, if I had had a clear picture of it . . ."
  6. "It gets worse in that the technology lets you look down that data tunnel at lightening speed—then the tunnel turns into a dot"
  7. "I can't see my men in the field now, because I look through the computer"

Thought Experiments in the "Vision" of Information

• Geological Images (cf., Borgman, p. 173): DOE Petroleum Reservoir Characterization Project, Geological Images from U. Montana Computer Science Dept.
• Medscape (http://www.medscape.com/), Medical Images (http://www.medscape.com/Home/Search/formImages.html)
• Visualization of 3D MRI Human Head Data (Clint Potter, National Center for Supercomputing Applications)
• Matt Kirschenbaum, "A White Paper on Information" (1998): "Here I want to argue that graphic design is actually possessed of a deeper and much more specific import for critical observers of the new media: that it is in fact the single most important arena in which the public learns to recognize the look and feel of information qua information. . . . So electronic media, I am arguing, assume material form through the models and renderings and visualizations that we create to interact with it in various information states. This interaction occurs at the immediate phenomenological level of the user interface, and it is here that the visual materiality of information has the potential to become aestheticized–even radically aestheticized. . . ."
• Mystery Picture A
• Identity of Mystery Picture
• Mystery Picture B
• Mystery Picture C
• Shoshana Zuboff, Interview 6