Phenomenology and Digital Information

Jenny Weight
RMIT University, Melbourne
E-mail: geniwate@ozemail.com.au
Key features: References; Notes; Author Details

All the nodes in this issue:

Editorial
Bibliography of Hypertext Criticism

Mez Breeze

Julianne Chatelain Richard E. Higgason Deena Larsen Bill Marsh Adrian Miles Jenny Weight

Two ways in which digital information seems apparently alien are:

  1. Encoding: digital information is 'written' in abstract languages whose relationship to natural language is tenuous if not wholly obscure, despite the fact that syntax and text is common to both. Online, we constantly receive messages about the coded nature of this environment (for example, via JavaScript error messages) that most of us don't understand. This environment rests upon a foundation that is even more alien than Sumerian - machine code. Moreover, these languages operate in different ways to natural language: they are never spoken and they are always performative. Digital information operates by silent spells.
  2. Embodiment: digital information is materially represented (via display devices) and at the same time seems abstractly disembodied. We experience our own embodiment as less tenuous than that of the digital. Furthermore, we interpret the world via extension (embodiment) in it [5]. A complementary aspect of embodiment is temporality. Humans are not only spatial but temporal creatures. Digital information takes up no space, and it doesn't decay. Its perfect abstraction, beyond time and space, is another side of its magical status.
Ultimately these two points may collapse into one: natural, metaphorical languages constrain us to think in terms of space and time; the fact that digital information seems outside these constraints may be a function of, or indeed permitted by, its non-metaphorical encoding [6].

A phenomenology of digital information would explore the undoubted existence of digital information in such a way that acknowledges that 'it' is never approached, by humans, as an unmediated material object. Humans interact with digital information in concrete ways, but digital information is only displayed in the 'real' world via technologies that do not appear to give access to its essence, which is locked away in memory (for example). We are forced to wonder whether there is an 'it' in any sense similar to the existence of other objects, or whether its 'essence' is its parasitic relationship on other more securely materialistic objects (like monitor screens).

Nevertheless, our experience of a digital 'it' persists. Most people who have manipulated a digital file believe there is an entity somewhere beyond the surface display, tucked away in memory, which is being processed. Without a digital object somewhere, we seem forced back upon the realm of magic.

A phenomenology of digital information would acknowledge our apparently dualistic relationship with the digital as an initial step towards a less oppositional relationship, in which questions of ambiguous embodiment and unpronounceable encoding would be explored.

According to Heidegger (2001: 306), the types of entities that we are able to know must 'become accessible as they are in themselves'. For Heidegger this means that 'we are ourselves the entities to be analysed' (p. 307). Our ability to analyse the digital is circumscribed by human capacities and our situatedness within the world. Embedded in any statement about digital information are statements about our experience as humans and how this informs our relationship to digital information.

A case in point is a human desire to locate the digital object. Such an attempt confronts us with the apparent ontological discontinuities mentioned above. Hayles (1999) argues for ontological continuity. Code cannot be separated from the material medium in which it is instantiated. In this sense all entities are coded entities, including humans.

Information, like humanity, cannot exist apart from the embodiment that brings it into being as a material entity in the world; and embodiment is always instantiated, local and specific. (Hayles 1999: 49)

Hayles' position radically departs from the popular 'magical' one [7]. However, an extreme in which we abstract a 'reality' divorced from popular conceptions of human experience speaks to an idealism that relegates lived experience to at best second place [8].

Proceeding from a Heideggerian starting point that acknowledges Being-in-the-world as 'not separable into consciousness on the one hand and objects on the other' (Solomon 2001: 34), a phenomenology of digital information would unpack the apparent dualisms that surround the relations of humans to digital information. Issues like encoding and embodiment would be analysed to determine if the status of digital information as object is viable. In the light of this analysis, new insights not only into the digital, but also into humanness, may arise.

Finally, in a move that takes us beyond phenomenology, experiential reactions to digital information may be analysed in the light of more diachronic narratives such as that of Hayles (1999).

Notes

[5] Embodiment is essential in our relations with objects in the world. Merleau-Ponty (1964: 93) argues "I inevitably grasp my body as a spontaneity which teaches me what I could not know in any other way except through it".

[6] When any variable is just a container for values to be added to, there seems no room for metaphor: any variable paired with any value has equal validity.

[7] An interesting project would explore how our experience of coded reality as alien ironically relates to Hayles' concept of the material instantiation of code, which includes the instantiation of our own DNA code in our own bodies.

[8] A binary should not be entirely collapsed if it remains part of the way we conceptualise the world around us. The fact that binary thinking may not be ultimately 'true' does not destroy its power.

References

Hayles, N. Katherine (1999) How we Became Posthuman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press)

Heidegger, Martin (2001) "The question of Being". In Solomon, R. C. Phenomenology and Existentialism (Lanham, MA: Rowman & Littlewood). Originally in Heidegger, Martin (1962) Being and Time, translated by John MacQuarie and Edward Robinson (Harper & Row)

Merleau-Ponty, M. (1964) Signs (Northwestern University Press)

Solomon, R. C. (2001) Phenomenology and Existentialism (Lanham, MA: Rowman & Littlewood)