Nature V Technology

Every person who comes in to contact with technology on a daily bases, so in essence every single person in America (and increasingly across the globe) has had the frustrating experience of not being able to get their gadget to work properly.

Global Positioning Systems don’t work in the rain. My Ethernet porthole was fried from a thunderstorm. Cell phones lose signal in thickly wooded areas. Is there a pattern developing here? When it comes to nature versus technology, nature always dominates. To put the obvious English-major-spin on the idea: nature is indifferent to human attachment to technology. This idea or the realization of the idea got me to thinking about the capacity of technology to take on human characteristics. (i.e. the computer program that determines the sex of an author of a text, programs used to “grade” the quality of writing of a student, etc.)

So if humans are known to be fallible wholly-imperfect beings known for errors, how can these computer programs ever fully establish 100% efficiency? The answer, according to Hayles, although technologies can “enhance human well-being and the fullness and richness of human-being-in-the-world” we, as humans, can never fully reduce our experiences, our innate judgments, perceptions, ideas, and subjectivity “merely to information processing or information machines” (Hayles 8). So, where I commend the valiant efforts of computer programmers, who, I might add, continue to WOW me with the ever-evolving programs constantly in rotation, I think the ability for computers complete subjective tasks such as grade papers, or determine the gender of a writer, among other capabilities, with guaranteed efficiency and success, is unrealistic. Where I’m not sure I buy in to the idea that we are all half human and half machine, I don’t disagree with Hayles’ idea that in contemporary society “natural and the artificial are increasingly entwined (8).