How We Think summary (Part 1)
My understanding of N. Katherine Hayles’ How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis is an account of how humans have a long standing historical method with which we perceive and absorb information based on practices of reading and writing that activate the conscious mind; yet with the advent of digital media emerging to the forefront of public communications and advancements of knowledge, humans receive more information (and more quickly) through the processing of images and stimuli conducted through machines with both their conscious and unconscious mind. In Darwinian terms, humans process information much faster today than past predecessors (as recent as the 1960’s); adaptive responses to recent technological advancements have reshaped how humans analyze and also how they put information together to create narrative. In essence, Hayles offers big picture concepts of perception, consciousness and time, which require a fourth element, space, in order to co-exist as narrative operatives; these four combined help humans to not only construct, but also absorb modern day storytelling. The idea being that humans construct narrative today at a faster pace because their environment (and environment’s technological advancements) have forced them to adapt to the rapid fire execution of digital information being hurled their way every day. As a result, storytellers must now adjust the elemental components (in comparison to earlier time periods) in order to keep up with the current status of human processing.
How We Think
Hayles underlining academic interest is in humans and their evolution in co-existence with technology. This theme is especially accentuated in this book where Hayles argues that we currently find ourselves caught in the precarious gap between print culture era and digital culture era: “The Age of Print is passing and the assumptions, presuppositions, and practices associated with it now are becoming visible as media-specific practices rather than the largely invisible status quo (2). For this reason, the humanities are now in the process of acknowledging digital humanities as a sub-category and digital culture now affects the speed and consciousness to which humans absorb and process information. The last word in book’s title is in essence the fundamental underpinning of Hayle’s thesis; technogenesis is clinically defined as a process of “adaptation, the fit between organisms and their environments recognizing that both sides of the engagement (humans and technologies) are undergoing coordinated transformations” (p. 81). While a concept borrowed from the evolutionary sciences, at its core technogenesis describes how “epigenetic changes in human biology can be accelerated by changes in the environment that make them even more adaptive, which leads to further epigenetic changes” (10). In this case, “technology” is the substitute for “environment” and Hayles alludes to the complicated and porous interaction between humans and technology where they co-exist and most importantly evolve together thus fruitfully furthering a line of knowledge inquiry. Yet Hayles is also careful to clarify the hierarchical order between humans and machines: “People—not technologies in themselves—will decide through action and inaction whether an intervention such as this will be successful” (p. 18).
How We Read
With technological advancements affecting present-day human processes, Hayles offers three categories for with which we interpret data: close reading, hyper reading, and machine reading. Close reading is perhaps the most historically familiar and traditionally applied practice, particularly in humanity studies, and it is best described as “detailed and precise attention to rhetoric, style, language choice, and so forth through a word-by-word, analysis of a text’s linguistic techniques…” (58). Hyper reading is synonymous with visual information, social media and web content, which allows for accelerated access to information and includes “scanning (looking for a particular keyword, image, or other textual feature) and skimming (trying to get the gist quickly)” (61). It should be noted that this kind of reading doesn’t scrutinize its source material and tends to yield more general analysis over the specific analysis of close reading. And finally, machine reading outsources analysis to the technological apparatus that is able to quickly isolate and detect large-scale patterns that would go otherwise unnoticed through close or hyper modes of reading. Hayles predicts that though machine reading is now only in its infancy, it is the next logical step in the evolution of reading under the definition of technogenesis that asserts mutual reliance between humans and machines (71). Hayles dissuades the reader from preferential treatment of any given reading style and insists that it is the combination of these three practices that produces the narratives that our current era enjoys. Furthermore, Hayles reasserts that it is the human who is at the forefront of the human-technology equation and so it is the human who decides which particular style of reading best suits the given situation.
Contemporary Technogenesis
As a parallel to defining human evolution in relationship to machines, Hayles explores two concepts of time: time as based on multi-layered human experience and time that is measured (85-86). Hayles also introduces the limited capabilities of human consciousness revealing consciousness is only able to handle between forty-five to twelve bits per second in contrast to unconscious activity, including those of our senses, which processes at 11 million bits per second (95). The advancement of conscious and unconscious speeds were clear when Hayles’ colleague showed her students The Parallax View where students laughed through the film’s supposed subliminal image flashes unable to understand how such slowly timed flashes once “occur[ed] at the threshold of consciousness” (97). Hayles analyzes Steve Tomasula’s TOC: A New-Media Novel (2009) and ironically reveals that while humans create time by building devices to measure it, measuring devices create and affect humans through the regulation of time itself (115). Using TOC as the example, a number of storylines were woven together by a series of collaborators across different vantage points and different temporalities permitting technology and humans to coalesce in order to produce new combinations of time with story in relationship to spatiality and awareness.
Technogenesis speaks to a practice that is in the process of unfolding its true impact and potential. Hayles addresses an intricate series of processes that construct human narratives and interpretations and references these devices as a means of speaking to the future, the irony being that these predictions on perception, consciousness, temporality, and spatiality actually return to the discussions of our greatest and oldest philosophers.