Precision, hah! Computers are better at poetry than they are at math.
Jacques Leslie
It should not have taken the Pentium math-bug debacle to remind us that computers do not always deliver absolute precision. On the contrary, for all their grounding in mathematical exactitude and their annoying literal-mindedness, computers are really ambiguity-generating machines.
Consider humble E-mail, perhaps the simplest form of computer-mediated communication. At first glance, the difference between a message written on paper and sent through the postal service versus its identically worded electronic counterpart seems insignificant: Both contain the same language, so their meaning is the same -- or is it?
One is an artifact of the material world, with intimations of permanence. The other, a c
aptive of cyberspace, can be eliminated in a keystroke. One is evocative -- its paper quality, handwriting, and scent all convey nuances of meaning -- while the other is framed within the bland uniformity of ASCII. Moreover, it is unlikely that the two messages would use precisely the same words. The tendency in E-mail is toward informality: Gonna and gotta replace going to and must. The shift in E-mail is toward oral speech patterns, a rejection of the precision of written discourse in favor of spontaneity.
p is weakened, for the new medium encourages collaboration, often by anonymous contributors. Even the idea of the book itself is threatened, as publishers of electronic scholarly journals have already discovered.
Photography is also rendered fuzzy by digitalization. The malleability of digitized photographs has caused people to look on all photos with deepened skepticism. It is now virtually impossible to tell which images are digitally manipulated. Although photographic trickery has been around for almost as long as the camera, digital technology makes it much easier to doctor an image. Digital art has also broken down the distinction between an "original" and its copies, for all possess the same digital components.
In some digital pursuits, ambiguity is exactly the point. In Multiuser Dimensions, or MUDs, those adolescent computer playgrounds in which players take on imaginary identities while cavorting within a fictional universe, much of the excitement stems from the simple fact that few playe
rs know with certainty anything about one another. The player with whom I'm conversing may be a man who presents himself as a woman, a woman presenting herself as a man, or, for that matter, a cleverly designed "bot" that responds to comments in ways that produce the illusion of personhood.
Digital audio raises interesting questions. Composer John Oswald's Plunderphonics, for example, consists of works by musicians ranging from Beethoven to Michael Jackson that Oswald had digitally manipulated in startling and amusing ways. By creating "new" works out of familiar ones, Oswald demonstrated that musical authorship is a surprisingly complex issue, since all music borrows from all the sounds that surround us.
One reason for the rise of computer-generated ambiguity surely is the newness of digital technology. Just as in the early years of electrification and the telephone, we're still trying to figure out what we want computers to do for us, and in the meantime we're confused.
But something else
is going on here as well. We like to think of computers as innately masterful at computation (thus, our ridicule for the Pentium when it returns inaccurate results). But we tend to forget that because some number strings are infinitely long, even the most sophisticated computers must settle for numerical approximation -- which is to say, imprecision. And imprecision doesn't apply just to computation. While computers' breathtakingly broad impact stems from their capacity to render so much of reality in 0s and 1s, we forget that those combinations of 0s and 1s are all approximations or, put another way, metaphors. Of course, metaphors rightfully dwell in the province of poetry, where they don't mimic reality but use ambiguity to evoke it.
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Jacques Leslie (
jacques@well.com
) writes frequently on the social impact of computers. He is the author of The Mark: A War Correspondent's Memoir of Vietnam and Cambodia (Four Walls Eight Windows, 1995).
Ambiguity Machines
