Abstract | Keywords | Export | Availability | Bookmark

Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

We live in a world, according to N. Katherine Hayles, where new languages are constantly emerging, proliferating, and fading into obsolescence. These are languages of our own making: the programming languages written in code for the intelligent machines we call computers. Hayles's latest exploration provides an exciting new way of understanding the relations between code and language and considers how their interactions have affected creative, technological, and artistic practices. My Mother Was a Computer explores how the impact of code on everyday life has become comparable to that of speech and writing: las anguage and code have grown more entangled, the lines that once separated humans from machines, analog from digital, and old technologies from new ones have become blurred. My Mother Was a Computer gives us the tools necessary to make sense of these complex relationships. Hayles argues that we live in an age of intermediation that challenges our ideas about language, subjectivity, literary objects, and textuality. This process of intermediation takes place where digital media interact with cultural practices associated with older media, and here Hayles sharply portrays such interactions: how code differs from speech; how electronic text differs from print; the effects of digital media on the idea of the self; the effects of digitality on printed books; our conceptions of computers as living beings; the possibility that human consciousness itself might be computational; and the subjective cosmology wherein humans see the universe through the lens of their own digital age. We are the children of computers in more than one sense, and no critic has done more than N. Katherine Hayles to explain how these technologies define us and our culture. Heady and provocative, My Mother Was a Computer will be judged as her best work yet.

Computers in literature --- Homme et ordinateur [Interaction entre ] --- Human-computer interaction --- Interactie tussen mens en computer --- Interaction entre l'homme et l'ordinateur --- Mens-computer interactie --- Réalité virtuelle --- Virtual reality --- Virtuele realiteit --- Virtuele werkelijkheid --- Computational intelligence --- User-centered system design --- Computer Science --- Sociolinguistics --- Programming languages (Electronic computers) --- Literature and science --- Literature and technology --- American literature --- Semantics --- Social aspects --- History and criticism --- Computational intelligence. --- Human-computer interaction. --- Computers in literature. --- Virtual reality. --- History and criticism. --- Environments, Virtual --- Virtual environments --- Virtual worlds --- Computer-human interaction --- Human factors in computing systems --- Interaction, Human-computer --- Intelligence, Computational --- Computer simulation --- Reality --- Human engineering --- User interfaces (Computer systems) --- Artificial intelligence --- Soft computing --- E-books --- 20th century --- Linguistique --- Computational linguistics --- Informatique --- Programming languages (Electronic computers) - Semantics - Social aspects --- American literature - 20th century - History and criticism --- language, programming, code, greg egan, intermediation, computation, cosmology, subjectivity, virtual, simulation, the mask, stanislaw lem, digital, analog, transmitting, patchwork girl, shelley jackson, connectivity, cryptonomicon, neal stephenson, figurative, performance, media, etext, print, constraint, information, writing, speech, textuality, literature, nonfiction, communication, text, self, consciousness, man vs machine. --- Interaction homme-ordinateur --- Ordinateurs --- Littérature américaine --- Dans la littérature --- 20e siècle --- Histoire et critique