Where Expression Meets Program and Program Meets Man

Reflecting back upon my own musings about Theory and, after a particularly insightful and colorful journey down a rabbit hole, cogitating about Christopher's leap into the world of digital self-expression that merely rehashes facts and puts a redigested mask of the "advertisement self" on display, it becomes more imperative to understand how the computer and cyberspace, as it were, inflects meaning upon our everyday digital goings-on. My discovery of Theory and thought, and what about digital media gets me going, really boiled down to the realization that the media reproduces itself while, simultaneously, we infuse it with our own idea of meaning or purpose. With such diverse approaches to this new media, and so many varied reactions, Chesher's perspective on what he has deemed 'invocational media' and its many, widely interpreted facets of action, suddenly become relevant.

In understanding the spatial pull of what Chesher calls 'computing,' one constructs his or her own virtual reality, otherwise known as cyberspace. There is really no cardboard box somewhere that contains a standard version of cyberspace, or any real, solid space-filling model of what this 'cyberworld' ought to be or how it ought to function. While we may understand the world of virutal reality as a spatial one, or at least one that is navigable by the same means that we might utilize to manuever through the roads of a city to some pre-planned destination, we must also realize that, to a certain extent, we are creating our own experience of the cyberworld and, simultaneously, creating our own virtual roads through which to navigate it. Unlike real roads, which do not change course just because we have not driven upon them before, or houses, which do not move about around a neighborhood between one visit and the next, cyberworld is empty until we create it, or, in theory, our experience with it.

Another of Chesher's metaphors, involving computing discourse as magical command and reception, involves the effect that technology has upon its users. For instance, while it doesn't much matter that a player of an online role-play game, or RPG, enjoys his or her thoughtless control of another identity, crudely formed into a virtually solid entity, it does matter that this user, in defeating the given enemy in this RPG, feels a sense of power. There is no true power or authority complex incorporated in this virtual victory, for someone before the user had to create the coding for the game and thus already knew how to defeat the enemy, not to mention how the user could construct his or her alter-ego and how he or she would navigate the playing field, or game environment. However, the false sense of power the user feels originates in his or her belief of triumphing over something uncontrollable or magical in its function, as it is, perhaps, beyond his or her computing comprehension. Similarly, a new Internet user may not understand how, by pressing "send," her email can find itself in the inbox of another user many miles away, but that does not necessarily mean that there is any magical power inherent in the computer; it simply means that there is some sort of living science involved, embodied in code or programming, that the user may not be aware of.

Similarly, Chesher also discusses the alien nature of invocational media, but personifies it with a real sense of humanity. While we consciously understand that computers are not human, it is inevitable to compare the two. Where a servant will act under command, a computer does the same. Just as you can ask a person to pick up the piece of paper on the desk, you can ask a computer to retrieve information from a database. Although it is obvious that this medium is not living, it effectively communicates some form of identity, or, as Christopher brought up, a sort of "poster identity for sale," or an "advertised self," as on Facebook or other popular networking sites. However impersonal the computer may act in its commands (go to this website, recall this document), it stores some of the most personal and identifying information an individual has to offer. An emotional email from daughter to mother, a blog wrought with fury, a passionate editorial written for a news site, a YouTube video of baby's first birthday, a multimedia experience created to evoke sympathy; all of these forms of communication are the basest and most personalized, human forms of exchange and expression available.

So, in analyzing the computer's metaphorical life as spatial kingdom, magical creature, and red-blooded human, we come to understand how cyberspace functions as both a technological and practical system of wires, codes, and programmed data and as a breathing beast expressing a user's own version or idea of his identity, however falsely, and his most animal reactions and instincts.