In 1968 Philip K. Dick published Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, asking the fundamental question of how human our electronic creations could become. The possibility of a computer becoming human like reverberated in America spawning HAL, the Terminator, the Borg, and many other such horrors. Manovich’s exploration of transcoding as a principle of new media reveals the less investigated, but equally fundamental question of how computerized people can become. In the Terminator or HAL’s case, it is an example of binary code based machines learning human language and culture, whereas Manovich illustrates the potential of human language and culture imitating binary code.
An inanimate, electronic object gaining the creative and cultural capacity of humans makes for an interesting story: an object of our creation is raised to our own level, and eventually defeated. The other side, however, is more disturbing. What if we were to lose our creative capacity, replacing it with the inhuman abilities of our computerized creations? Once reduced to such a level, how do we regain our original being?
Manovich maintains that the more new media is used for encoding cultural concepts the more the “culture layer” and the “computer layer” influence one another. This interaction indicates increasing incorporation of Cartesian computerized logic and ontology into our current culture and ontology: “cultural categories and concepts are substituted, on the level of meaning and/or language, by new ones that derive from the computer’s ontology, epistemology, and pragmatics” (Manovich, 17).
The problem inherent in this substitution of concepts, reaches even further than the cultural realm in which it begins. As Manovich states our ontology, epistemology, and our pragmatics are at stake, essentially our understanding of being is transformed by our interactions with the computerized media, specifically the transcoding necessary for this interaction. The danger of this Cartesian system lies in the famous “I think therefore I am” proclamation. Understanding human being solely as thought, and self-understanding solely as self-consciousness is an incomplete view of human presence, being-here. Authentic existence requires the possibility of the individual encountering something outside of its inner sphere, the experience of something “other.”
In relation to computerization this flaw can be seen in the fact that binary code is too much of a self contained and closed system to encode the possibilities of human culture and experience. Thus transcoding can affect a “more general process of cultural reconceptualization” (Manovich, 17), that has potentially culturally degrading results. With these dangers present, it is evident that computerization’s effects on us are just as dangerous, if not more, than our effects on computers. Language, culture, and even an understanding of the self are at risk if we heedlessly continue attempting to synthesize Manovich’s cultural and computer layers. When Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers agreed that the biggest threat to humanity in the Twentieth century and onward was technology, they did not have terminators or HAL in mind, rather they anticipated this possible shift in human consciousness towards computerization.