So, like Shock and Awe, I was thoroughly seduced by Kind of Blue. Which means that I spent a couple hours glued to the computer screen, and towards the end of that time, I was pretty sure that my eyes were going to fall out.

And let's be clear: I am no computer-screen-staring lightweight. My summer/winter break job=eight hours a day sitting in a cubicle staring at a computer screen. One of my hobbies involves writing jibberish (code) in a text editor. I blog, I scour four or five news sites every day, and Facebook kind of owns me.

It turns out that our discussion of how the novel created the individual (in Nancy Armstrong’s book) has several more recent parallels. N. Katherine Hayles mentions two things that struck me as perfect examples of how technology not only affects, but also in a way creates, its users/readers.

The first example is the computer itself. Hayles writes: “In their general form, computers are simulation machines producting environments, from objects that sit on desktops to networks spanning the globe. To construct an environment is, of course, to anticipate and structure the user’s interaction with it and in this sense to construct the user as well as the interface” (48). This makes a lot of sense to me. Computers require that users act in a certain way, and they condition users to expect certain things from computers (note our own dumbfoundedness when network connections on campus are temporarily disabled for a few hours…)