This page contains materials
intended to facilitate class discussion
(excerpts from readings, outlines of issues,
links to resources, etc.). The materials
are not necessarily the same as the instructor's
teaching notes and are not designed to represent
a full exposition or argument. This page
is subject to revision as the instructor
finalizes preparation. (Last revised
4/13/07
)
Preliminary Class
Business
Bookstore will start returning unsold
books to publishers in two weeks
Start reading Thomas Pynchon's Crying
of Lot 49
The Computing Revolution
We've been introduced to the 20th-century
revolutions in media and communications.
In both realms, new technologies and
new, general theories combined
to suggest an autonomous order of
mediated communications beyond the ordinary
understanding of human beings.
Today we start on the computing
revolution that added itself to the new
media and communications
to create our contemporary understanding
of "information."
Agenda:
a history of computing in two installments,
then the rise of
"new media" (course
schedule)
Information
Paradigm
Signature
Technologies
Logical
Architecture
Peak
Epoch (Period of
Monopolistic or Cartel Dominance)
Analog Computing: the
use of a physical apparatus to
model a mathematical formula along
a continuous scale of variation."Computing"
or "calculation" is
then the inter-operation of the
mechanical parts. Cf., the slide
rule (invented 1622); gears
and cogs in Difference Engine
(Definition
of "analog")
Limitations of analog computing:
Not every mathematical problem
can be matched by a physical
machine
Physical limitations to
accuracy & speed
Non-programmable computing;
or limited programmability
through externally stored
programs:
Jacquard
Loom (1804) | punch
card
from
Ada, Lady Lovelace's
notes:
"The
distinctive characteristic
of the Analytical
Engine, and that
which has rendered
it possible to
endow mechanism
with such extensive
faculties as bid
fair to make this
engine the executive
right-hand of abstract
algebra, is the
introduction into
it of the principle
which Jacquard
devised for regulating,
by means of punched
cards, the most
complicated patterns
in the fabrication
of brocaded stuffs. . . .
We may say most
aptly that the
Analytical Engine
weaves algebraical
patterns just as
the Jacquard-loom
weaves flowers
and leaves."
J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly,
and the electronic digital ENIAC (1943-44)
1
| 2
| Vacuum
Tube
Intervention of John
von Neumann (meeting at railroad
station between von Neumann and Herman
Goldstine)
Principle of the "stored program"
and EDVAC
(1944-45); von Neumann's A First
Draft of a Report on the EDVAC (June
1945)
Eckert-Mauchly Corporation (later
Sperry-Rand) and the impact of computing
on business and the media: the UNIVAC
or "Universal Automatic Computer"
(1951) 1
| 2
| 3.
UNIVAC's prediction of the Eisenhower
landslide in 1952 for CBS
Thomas Watson, Jr.'s epiphany at IBM
in 1952: "My God, here we are trying
to build Defense Calculators, while
UNIVAC is smart enough to start taking
all the civilian business away!"
IBM
System/360 (c. 1969) (multi-level
series of computers with shared programming)
Paradigm of Mainframe
Computing
Conceptual
Paradigm: Enduring Principles
(1) The
Digital Principle
Digital
principle
is mathematically general:
Herman
Goldstine, The
Computer from Pascal
to von Neumann,
p. 143:
"[The
digital approach] is
the realization that
a machine can be built
to imitate the human
method of calculating:
to count and to build
up the elementary operations—addition,
subtraction, multiplication,
division—by
counting. Not only
can this be done but
it may be shown that,
in general, mathematical
formulations may be
handled by means of
these elementary operations. . . .
suffice it to say
that for our purposes
numerical mathematics
can be built up out
of the elementary processes
of counting, and therefore
that this approach
has a very real sense
of universality or
general purposeness
about it."
Digital
principle
(specifically,
base-two
system)
is logically general:
George Boole (1815-1864)
and the Boolean fusion
of algebra and logic:
"Let us conceive, then, of an Algebra in which the symbols x, y, z, &c.
admit indifferently of the values 0 and 1, and of these values alone. The laws,
the axioms, and the processes, of such an Algebra will be identical in their
whole extent with the laws, the axioms, and the processes of an Algebra of Logic."
Suited to the "fortress" organization
(e.g., the military or
a "vertically-integrated" company:
hierarchically controlled,
autonomous, non-networked
to the outside world)
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)
References
History of Computing Resources:
Herman H. Goldstine, The
Computer from Pascal to von Neumann
(Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press,
1993)
Barbara Garson, The
Electronic Sweatshop: How Computers
Are Transforming the Office of
the Future into the Factory of
the Past (1988; rpt. New York:
Penguin, 1989)
Other Resources:
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)
William Gibson and Bruce Sterling,
The Difference Engine (New
York: Bantam, 1991)
Mark Poster, The Second
Media Age (Cambridge: Polity,
1995)
Information
as Mass Media
Digital