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My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts
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 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 language 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 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.
My Mother Was a Computer explores how the impact of code on everyday life has become comparable to that of speech and language 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 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.
290 pages, Paperback
First published October 1, 2005
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
January 9, 2022
Great book about the philosophy of a "Regime of Computation." this book pairs well with David Golumbia's The Cultural Logic of Computation 2009. It also goes well with Mirowski Machine Dreams 2002.
Hayles is an eloquent, unique philosopher of science. I cannot recommend this work highly enough to anyone interested in computation, philosophy, anthropomorphism and technomorphism.
Hayles is an eloquent, unique philosopher of science. I cannot recommend this work highly enough to anyone interested in computation, philosophy, anthropomorphism and technomorphism.
June 7, 2013
As always, an immensely ambitious and successful work on who and what we are as a species. Also as always, I find Hayles' theoretical work more fascinating than her readings, yet her readings are still strong.
November 6, 2010
will let you know
July 5, 2017
I couldn't follow the argument of this book, although I found the topics of great interest to me. I feel the name-dropping and the literary theory and unclear language and argumentation got in the way of what could have been an interesting study. I was glad she liked Greg Egan however, one of my favorite authors.
April 5, 2022
A text to return to - have added to my understanding of some philosophical positions around the computational outlook on culture, but also a joy to read some dynamic literary analysis (particularly intrigued by Stanislaw Lem's The Mask, which I have to find now.
May 9, 2022
Quite complicated to read. Hayles has a brillant mind but could write clearer and shorter
May 5, 2013
She did a good job of building and her argument and there were some good nuggets. Yet, I didn't like her examples as much in this book as others, and she did assume that the reader knew more than even the academic reader necessarily would. The writing style is overly academic, making little attempt to connect to the uninitiated in cyborg theory. I have read her other books, so I was able to wade through her text but I had to take my time with it much more than is normal for my own reading.
June 23, 2018
This is not a book for the average reader. Chapter 1 is engaging up to a point but from then on the emphasis on literary scholarship narrows the attraction dramatically. I had to move on...
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews