Thursday, February 28, 2008

Dasein?

The first semester of my freshman year I wrote a couple of research essays about computers and the internet, and came across several of this class's readings in the process. That was back in the innocent days before I knew what semiotics and postmodernism were. I remember reading "It Looks Like You're Writing A Letter" and some other stuff in Fuller's Behind the Blip. I was kind of bothered by the line

“the radicality of Word lies instead in its absolute refusal of 'Dasein'—the instantaneous being-there and fused-at-once-with-tool-and-act supposedly experienced by craftsmen”

It seems rather to miss the point. McPherson and Manovich have a better conception of things (particularly McPherson--Manovich's technical art stuff really doesn't convince me, though I guess I'm not much for visual art)--the new technology is a virtual space into which we project our consciousness. William Gibson talks about the "consensual hallucination" of cyberspace, but it's not just the internet as public meeting-place--things like Microsoft Word as a bundle of functions have evolved into something much more intricate. If the computer is our new, virtual world, Word is simply that world's typewriter, almost a bit outdated except that we haven't come up with something better yet. Barthes has it that when we encounter another text--which will by nature be an amalgam of others--we function as our own amalgam of various texts, and pool together like drops of mercury. Pleasing visual metaphors aside, I see no reason why 'Dasein' is being absolutely refused by the new media--rather, we still haven't quite figured out how craftsmanship works in the digital world.

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