Was anybody listening to NPR today? They did a segment about electronic voting that was interesting on a number of levels. First, the speakers talked about the need to have a “paper trail”—like paper receipts that reproduced what the voter saw on the computer screen--to counter people’s mistrust of the computer’s ability to “get it right.” People were saying that, at least initially, electronic voting systems are going to have to incorporate some form of paper-based element for voters to have confidence in their validity. Secondly, toward the end of the program, one of the callers made the comment that one of the dangers inherent in switching to computer-based voting was that—BECAUSE IT WAS SO DIFFICULT TO READ AND UNDERSTAND THE CODE THAT THESE PROGRAMS WERE WRITTEN IN—it would be very difficult to spot tampering. Even if someone tweeked the program to change two out of every thousand or so votes, it would have an enormous impact on the way the election turned out. Even so, the caller was saying, the change would be virtually undetectable as it would remain hidden in layers upon layers of unintelligible code. I think the program is going to be repeated tonight for anybody interested.
Now to get to what I really wanted to blog about. As I was reading the hypertexts and hypertext theory for this week, I was thinking that narrative frame theory might be brought to bear on works of hypertext. In this class, we’ve been talking a lot about frames—the frame of the codex, the frame of the computer screen, the cinematic frame, frames of production, etc.—and the way that these frames alter/control our readings of texts. (I give up—I can’t think of a better word). I’ve just been sort of toying with the idea that in hypertext fictions (and by this I mean those that are on the computer and opposed to paper ones—I don’t know what terms differentiate these two things) while you still have a horizontal frame, the screen, the packaging, etc., you have no sense of a vertical frame. Unlike something like Joyce’s Ulysses where you can hold the book in your hand and have a sense of how much information/text is there in the first place, in a computer-based hypertext document there is really no way to know how “deep” the text goes. This goes beyond what John Frow calls the “ near invisibility” of the frame in traditional codex books—in Hypertext the frame really is invisible in a sense—only the program and the programmer know what it is. I can hear possible objections—hypertexts may include a map so that you get a sense of the world of the story (Aarseth talks about this I
think) and how deep it goes, but I think there is something to make of this difference. I’m really interested in exploring this idea and would look forward to reading anyone’s comments.
See you in class. Jenny
I couldn't agree more. This familiarity issue that us "old media" types are running into just doesn't seem avoidable. In "Afternoon," I found myself cycling foward and backwards just to see what effects the technology was having on narrative. I think in doing this, I missed some of the point. In my distracted state, it was difficult to reflect on the differences that placement of text had on the story in its entirety. Is this something I'll get over, if this glorious electronic revolution finally stomps everything in its path? Are these issues (nostalgia, confusion, or whatever) similar to those experienced by scroll readers coming in contact with codexes? I know we have spent a good deal of time mentioning this problem, but it seems that most resistence (to repeat my catch word from last week) of new media can, in at least some ways, be tied to the "it just doesn't feel right" aspect.
Posted by: Brad at April 7, 2004 05:23 PMNice post, Jenny. Jay Bolter, one of the earliest hypertext theorists, was fond of the idea of "topographic writing." The text was a space to be explored, cartographically. (Interesting resonances to Adventure and its central conceit of cave exploration.) The maps in some hypertexts obviously make the metaphor explicit. Maybe this is another way of coming to Aarseth's central point, which is that hypertexts are not finally narratives, but rather true ergodic texts and perhaps closer to games.
Posted by: MGK at April 9, 2004 08:43 AMthough i'm interested in the idea of frame theory, i don't have the mental capacity to deal with it at the moment. but i would like to post a link related to your comments about electronic voting and perhaps more related to posthumanism than the great programmer/nonprogrammer divide. I heard a commentary on NPR last week, maybe?, and the guy was discussing why electronic voting doesn't *feel* like voting, why it doesn't feel *real*, *visceral*, *experiential*. i for one am TERRIFIED at the thought of these machines with questionable security and no backup for knowing how people voted and how those votes were counted. Does that make me a technological dinosaur? or just more afraid of rush limbaugh than maybe i should be?
anyway, here's the link if you want to take a listen:
http://www.npr.org/features/feature.php?wfId=1800361
melissa
I guess this is as good a place as any to bring up the whole ugly spectre of technophobia again. I am still not entirely convinced that Ullman's _The Bug_ is not in some way playing into the reader's/the culture's (naturalized) distrust of computers, of the digital, of data. As with Jenny's post on electronic voting and Melissa's very emphatic TERRIFIED response to the idea of computerized voting, I have to ask how do we negotiate, demystify, and eventually collapse this tension we have in our culture--being fearful of the computer and wary of its potentials, promises yet surrounded and inculcated by computers?
Granted this technophobia is really no different than any of the other mass culture fears/narratives being accreted over time and space by the media and bought into by the people (e.g. killer bees, lightning kills, fears of the immigrant, homosexual agenda, Y2K, identity theft, lead in water). I'm not saying that these narratives don't exist or that they don't happen, but I'm with Michael Moore in that our cultural imaginary is fed and full of conspicuous fears... fear of technology is one of them.
So, what do we do with the whole last presidential election Florida "chad" debacle? That is a completely "human" and analogy error?
I personally am a bit more trusting of computerized voting (and I don't know if the NPR dicussion is about the fancy LCD touch screen type voting or voting over the WEB) than hand-punching and hand-counting. But maybe I'm just biased toward the digital. I think the likelihood of physical, material ballot stuffing is similar to likelihood of electronic fraud. We already file our taxes via the web and phone, buy hundreds of millions of dollars of merchandise via the web, participate in millions of transactions (e.g. email, file sharing, websurfing, cookiedownlading, image swapping)...I would think that such things would be far more problematic than voting. I guess "voting" has an essence, an aura that makes it categorically different and therefore more "vulnerable" than credit card numbers?
The more important questions with electronic voting, to me, is access and not the fear of tampering. Who can vote electronically? Will e-voting be more democratic? Will e-voting bring out more voters?
Don't fear the digital,
ED
Um, "anlogy" => "analog"... ironic that it appears in a line about human error.
ED
Posted by: ED at April 12, 2004 08:13 AMThere was another report on NPR yesterday, 4/14, about the IRS computer system that is apparently a ticking time bomb. There are no programmers left who understand the code, so the entire organization lives in fear of the moment that a bug will come into the system and disrupt the IRS's ability to collect revenue and pay the government's bills. So our nation's financial backbone is run by a computer, whose language no one speaks. It struck me that a hacker could mess with the system, and no one would know. We assume it is vulnerable as hell, but have no means of defending it.
The IRS has tried to hire CIO's to coordinate a team to update the system, but the government has only thrown $600,000,000 at it so far. That sounds like a lot of money, but there are start up tech companies that get that kind of funding with an idea and no product. The reporter claimed that the IRS wouldn't pay a programming specialist enough to draw their attention for long, and the culture of the IRS was death to innovative thinking.
Posted by: Beth Keller at April 15, 2004 04:11 PM