2. Alice and the Assault on Reality (Part 2 of 12)
You have landed right in the middle of John Mulholland’s parody of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. If you wish to start at the very beginning of their adventures together, you should click here to follow them down the rabbit-hole.
Chapter Two — The Pool of Tears
How she longed to get out of that dark hall, and wander about among those beds of bright flowers and those cool fountains, but she could not even get her head through the doorway; ‘and even if my head would go through,’ thought poor Alice, ‘it would be of very little use without my shoulders.
Oh, how I wish I could shut up like a telescope! I think I could, if I only knew how to begin.’
For, you see, so many out of–the–way things had happened lately, that Alice had begun to think that very few things indeed were really impossible. [8]
Ever since William Gibson wrote his novel Neuromancer in 1984, it has been fashionable to consider the world of information as a separate realm [9].
Gibson’s “cyberspace” was a wonderland of gigabyte song lines where the flow of information was everything. Its futuristic hacker hero moved through a matrix that represented connections among social, commercial, and political institutions.
In Gibson’s fiction, and in the imagination of his readers, cyberspace was like Plato’s world of geometric perfection; like the world of dreams; like the afterlife. It was a way of putting the novelties of the information revolution firmly into the traditional beliefs of a world beyond reality.
The idea of the existence of a world of information — a cyberspace — is now part of daily life. The amount of time people spend in cyberspace is growing, as is the number of people who use it.
But this sterile, other-world view of information is to some extent due to the fact that information technology and computers are virtually synonymous. It is easy to see the computer screen as a doorway leading to another Wonderland.
‘I wish I hadn’t cried so much!’ said Alice, as she swam about, trying to find her way out.
‘I shall be punished for it now, I suppose, by being drowned in my own tears!
That will be a queer thing, to be sure!
However, everything is queer to-day.’ [10]
“Today the program has disappeared; one enters the screen as Alice stepped through the looking glass.” [11]
But this description from Sherry Turkle is not strictly true. It is a cultural construction shaped by historical circumstances — one in which the technology is widespread but still novel, a symbol of prestige, far from integrated into the fabric of life.
It’s probably why using a computer has been likened to going to the cinema and having to watch the projector instead of the film [12].
Only in the personal computer industry is it considered customary to sell products so unreliable and confusing that nearly a third of buyers are unable to use them without help.
According to Dataquest, some 200 million calls to personal computer technical hotlines will be made this year. In contrast, when was the last time you had to ‘install’ your television, your phone, or your video recorder? When have you ever had to call out technical support because the microwave wouldn’t work, or you couldn’t understand how to use it?
Yet if you ask people how many computers they use they’ll probably say one — their desktop computer. But in reality, it is closer to fifteen.
The personal computer is radically different in design from any other technology or appliance used by most of us. Though, if Intel or Microsoft had designed kitchen appliances, it seems likely we would be using £1,000 multipurpose “Kitchen Processors” rather than the low-cost, dedicated, push-button appliances we now have.
As the basis for a truly ubiquitous Internet, today’s computers simply will not play a part. So at the same time as computers become more widespread, more useable, and more powerful recognized aids to the business of communication, information technology is leaving the constraints of the computer behind and slipping out into all the other interstices of the world.
Next: Chapter Three — A Caucus-Race and a Long Tale
References
[8] The quotation is from Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
(Macmillan & Co., 1995), pp.8–9.
[9] William Gibson, Neuromancer (New York: Ace, 1984).
[10] The quotation is from Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
(Macmillan & Co., 1995), pp.20–21.
[11] Sherry Turkle, Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1996), p.31.
[12] David Kline, The Embedded Internet (Wired 2.11 p.54), p.56, Interval Research Corporation’s Brenda Laurel compares using a computer to going to the cinema and having to watch the projector instead of the movie.
