Human No More by Neil L. Whitehead & Michael Wesch

Author:Neil L. Whitehead & Michael Wesch
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University Press of Colorado
Published: 2012-03-24T16:00:00+00:00

INTERLUDE

Radhika (age 50):

In the mid-1980s, when small businesses that previously offered typewriter tutorials began to provide computer training, I was compelled to sign up. As a housewife, freelance writer/amateur poet, and mother of a toddler who was fascinated with his mother’s typewriting, I sought to improve myself by going to computer tutorials. I learned early programs such as Word, BASIC, COBOL, and a smattering of Fortran. I have read books about artificial intelligence and “Eliza” (http://www.knowledgerush.com/kr/encyclopedia/ELIZA/) and hoped to have the computer spit out poetry for me as well. As I learned more about computers, the punch cards that I had often stumbled across in my brother’s strewed belongings when he came home for vacation from his IIT campus began acquiring historical significance to me. Later these punch cards acquired even more significance as I realized their similarity to the cards on the Jacquard loom as I began examining offline and online technologies in global/local contexts. Little did I know that in my search for magic and in my laziness, I was to stumble upon complex, nuanced intersections of science, technology, text, image, subjectivity, and gendered spaces of technocultures. I did not know it then, but the business that offered these tutorials was training the future offshore labor forces for transnational businesses.

Globalization in digital formats had arrived in my backyard in Bhopal, India, in the mid-1980s. Thinking historically, it is no surprise that the infamous Bhopal gas tragedy (in December 1984), resulting from manufacturing industries offshoring outmoded technologies to third-world urban spaces, signaled a transition into a different phase in globalization. The resulting globalization appeared more sanitized and benevolent, even as more manufacturing jobs and computer hardware factories continued to be moved into borderlands (maquiladoras) and other third-world regions, because this move was virtually invisible in the clamor of the digital. Thus, as audiences the world over watched the broadcast of this disaster and made meaning, protesting the transfer of outmoded technologies, the focus of communication scholars conveniently shifted to examining empowerment through information technology (IT).

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