Reading Response for Week 2

Reading Response for Week 2

This week’s readings discuss interrelated topics, such as informatic control, computer-user interactivity, computability and incomputability, and glitch studies. Central to all the arguments is the notion of a cybernetic ideology, which I understand as a control system exhibits “circular causality” between machine and human/environment – “a circular interdependence of input and output, entailing that agency within the system is distributed and cannot be pinned down to specific agents (p.62, Scherffig).” It is a feedback loop that underlies any computer-user interaction. There is no interface without the user because it is designed and functioned according to the very principle of human-computer interaction. According to the HCI discourse, human-computer interaction is “an act of mediating between a user’s mental goals and the physical state of a system (p. 69, Scherffig),” and it is a one-way path that starts from interface designers/cognitive engineers, who produce design models, and ends up with interface users with their own mental models and goals. The former needs to make sure that their design model can successfully generate a correspondent mental model within their users that is in accordance with his mental goals. This is partly true, but it should be remembered that the cybernetic system includes circular causality, which means how computers/algorithms influence users are also of great significance (e.g., the creation of “new humans/nonhumans” by making humans machines through constant trainings of digital expertise).

I agree with Scherffig that there is a more nuanced picture of the human-computer interaction that emphasizes interdependence and participation, which I understand through the relationship between the cybernetic ideology and informatic control. This ideology is characterized by its idealization of absolute “efficiency, accuracy, and predictability (p.3, Nunes).” It depends on the informatic control, but also strengthens it. Hence, it is not surprising that users of Google and Facebook can never leave a circular feedback system in which algorithms constantly gather their information, provide them with tailored political messages, and even make predictions. While xxx argues that people do not notice their use of “the most powerful mind-control machine,” I believe that it is inspiring to take a look at searching engines in totalitarian contexts, where many people in fact have full awareness of the limitation and biased attitudes of this machine, since they are not living within the bubbles of freedom, equality, democracy, and liberty.

Robertson and Travaglia are very concerned with the production of social categories through data collection, analysis, and regard it as “a significant epistemic and ethical problem,” which designates a certain group as deviants and marginalizes them. In fact, deviant/error/noise is the core of glitch studies. The cybernetic notion of interaction, or information-transmission, can be interrupted by glitches (“an unexpected break within the flow of technology,” as defined in “Glitch Studies Manifesto”), and it is precisely glitches that help us escape from the informatic control and offer us a critical lens to reflect on the cybernetic ideology that encompasses us most of the time.

Last but not least, the argument for incomputability and undecidability of both computers and human minds also reminds of the notion of secular calculative reason. In the age of secularism, the firm belief in science that is based on mathematical calculation takes place of religious reason that is based on spirituality. To some extent, the sense of certainty once provided by gods now resides in science, in the so-called rational and objective calculation of people and computers. Hence, it is necessary to ask in what ways will secular people deal with their epistemological crisis with their gradual disillusion with computability and decidability. In fact, the incomputability and undecidability of computers also weaken the power of the cybernetic system, which is founded on the idea of absolute predictability.