Week12: Traumas of Code

I kept thinking why is the title of the article ‘Traumas of Code’ not ‘Traumas of symbol’. This is because I think that traumas could relate with symbols. However, I could tell now. Symbols have changed in the meaning depend on the culture or personal experience, and have multiple meanings. Yet codes are fixed in meaning and they can be to solve in only one way. In addition, Hayles focused on the code as mediators computers and human to overcome trauma.

Hayles quotes Joseph Weizenbaum’s ‘Computer Power and Human Reason’ in the last part of her article. That maybe the book has the key point of her thought. Dr. Weizenbaum’s secretary chatted with the ELIZA computer program, even though she knew the computer’s ability. Why did she do that? I would want to know the reason why people want to talk with a computer. Why do they not talk to people? Hayles agrees with his opinion that people shouldn’t give computer abilities like human being. However, as she mentioned, computers have the human’s faculty, now. They overpower human’s abilities. These parts in her article “…more and more code is written by software programs rather than humans……..In this guise they are seen as interacting positively with humans to provide transmission pathways for the articulation of trauma. In other ways, however, they are taking over from humans more of the cognitive load, a maneuver widely perceived as an implicit threat to human autonomy and agency…” that really made me terrified.