I want to take up this idea that David mentions in his coding blog post this week: that partnering with someone last Thursday “seemed to make the coding a more human and humane experience.” I similarly loved working closely with Joe (and tangentially with Kelly and Nathaniel) in class last Thursday. Yes, it felt more fun, more relaxed, more “human,” but I also feel I produced considerably more than I would have working on my own. This idea of collaboration certainly does put pressure on Chung’s idea of the code as “sorcerer,” in other words, the image master coder who sits alone in front of a computer for hours at a time. Could a group, or even a pair of coders, feel the same “sovereignty” that Chung is talking about? (Joe seemed to – even if it was “fleeting and largely illusory”). What happens when the “sovereignty” of the coder is diffused among multiple individuals? Personally, my “sovereignty” is most recognizable to me when it is shared, when it can be validated by a high five from another individual. Computers aren’t great at this kind of affirmation.

The “humanity” of coding is something Galloway (sort of) touches upon as well. At the conclusion of chapter one, he mentions that “protocological analysis must focus on the possible and the impossible, not a demystification of some inner meaning or ‘rational kernel’ within technology. Protocol is a circuit, not a sentence” (53). The “sentence” is what’s human here (the “circuit” is what’s machine). Galloway seems to want to separate the technological from any human intervention. In my last post, I discussed how this becomes increasingly harder to do as technology and the social/the political/the ethical become intertwined. We touched upon this in class last week as well; we can’t tell what is technology and what is capitalism.

I guess I’m trying to reclaim McLuhan here a little bit, that is, put some of the “humanity” back into coding. David’s digital humanities work on Shakespeare is a reminder to me that there is a still a person being facing the computer, someone who’s taking code and translating it into something that’s meaningful to them. Galloway claims that something like DNS “is not simply translation language, it is language. It governs meaning by mandating that anything meaningful must register and appear somewhere in its system” (50). But who is deciding what’s meaningful here? I would prefer to to think that it’s still the human being.