Before jumping in to respond to the prompt here, I\u2019ll admit I\u2019m less inclined to follow McPherson\u2019s line of thought between race and computer programing that seems rather thinly stretched (if we read race as biological race, that is). McPherson herself, in her attempts to clearly mark out her argument, appears to admit the tenuousness of the connection. She makes it clear that there was no intentional or conscious effort on the part of the computer engineers pioneering new systems of coding in the 1960s to further racist agendas or to create new, more insidious (because of their secrecy) forms of racism (149). The connection is not causal or even directly related, but a deeper, even invisible system that, despite its ephemeral nature, remains dangerous and invasive. From a simple rhetorical standpoint, these kinds of arguments invite suspicion. Arguing for the existence of something for which substantial evidence is virtually impossible to provide, and even further, arguing for systematic change because of that something, feels to rhetorically convenient to be real. Then again, this problem is shared by much of neo-Marxist and post-structuralist theory, so I\u2019m not pointing the finger only at McPherson. Still, it seems someone has to acknowledge that the emperor\u2019s not wearing anything.<\/p>\n
If I were reading this as a deconstructionist, I\u2019d start pulling at this thread to see what postmodern assumptions and critical race theory might underlie her efforts here, but this probably isn\u2019t the place for that.<\/p>\n
McPherson\u2019s argument seems to become clearer near its end, and here she calls for the changes one might generally expect if we accept the premise she establishes in the prior pages. She suggests that we better understand the computing systems that we use every day and how these systems determine our relation to our world, that we avoid being pulled into a formalist movement that would bracket social aspects of our digital experiences, and that we must keep our analysis firmly planted in an awareness of the power of capital. Each of these suggestions is smart, and I think we can see the importance of each. I\u2019m interested, as per the prompt, in the possible outcomes of pursuing these goals.<\/p>\n
A large part of McPherson\u2019s argument seems to hinge on the fear of a formalist or structuralist narrowing of the object of study, like what we saw with literary criticism mid-century (and from which we imagine \u2018hard\u2019 sciences like computer science suffer generally). We might look at the study of literary criticism, then, for a lesson in how a push in the opposite direction might go.<\/p>\n
Following the New Critics, as we know, came the explosion of cultural study through the lens of the Frankfurt School. While we strove to maintain the practice of close reading through this shift, our focus shifted from literary texts to virtually anything else. We came to view texts as in part representative of the cultures from which they came, and studied texts primarily as cultural artifacts. And in doing so, we might have lost something. Or at least some critics think so. I\u2019m thinking mainly of Harold Bloom, who, for all his charming cantankerousness, seems to get something right in saying that we lost a part of our taste for aesthetics when we sought out texts for their cultural value. In other words, if I can generalize, we privileged the social over the aesthetic, over the formal.<\/p>\n
In reading McPherson\u2019s call to privilege the social\u2014or at least to work actively to maintain the social as a major element\u2014in the world of computer science world, I wonder if we risk a similar loss. I would certainly concede that our worldviews manifest in surprisingly and unexpected ways, and certainly our computer programming and the philosophies we hold up in that process would reveal our worldviews, there seems a danger in making computer science about what it\u2019s not. We ought to be able to allow science to be science while acknowledging that it\u2019s never perfectly objective and that is has effects beyond what we can see and touch. This is where the \u201chumanities\u201d part of digital humanities comes in, and there\u2019s always important work to be done.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Before jumping in to respond to the prompt here, I\u2019ll admit I\u2019m less inclined to follow McPherson\u2019s line of thought between race and computer programing that seems rather thinly stretched (if we read race as biological race, that is). McPherson herself, in her attempts to clearly mark out her argument, appears to admit the tenuousness […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-732","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sheilaliming.com\/428DH\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/732","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sheilaliming.com\/428DH\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sheilaliming.com\/428DH\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sheilaliming.com\/428DH\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sheilaliming.com\/428DH\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=732"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/sheilaliming.com\/428DH\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/732\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":733,"href":"https:\/\/sheilaliming.com\/428DH\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/732\/revisions\/733"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sheilaliming.com\/428DH\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=732"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sheilaliming.com\/428DH\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=732"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sheilaliming.com\/428DH\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=732"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}