The Personalization of Complexity II.B.2.b. |
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Every human era has seen an increase in complexity. The change from hunting-gathering to agriculture made life more complex for those societies. But many of the past advances have been shared, community experiences. Experiences that one could consult with one's neighbors about, get professional help, discover solutions to technical problems in books and through institutions. In many ways, although the level of complexity has increased for each individual as it has increased for society, this ramp has historically been a public one. The central complaints of the "information age" tend to focus on the amount of data available to everyone. "Although researchers in the physical and human sciences acknowledged the importance of materiality in different ways, they nevertheless collaborated in creating the postmodern ideology that the body's materiality is secondary to the logical or semiotic structures it encodes." N. Katherine Hayles * In the post-human, post-information age, the networking of common knowlege may be undergoing change. We might wonder if the personal computer may come to defy our notions of shared and sharing complex information. Our computers are so complicated, so idiosyncratic, so personal, that we have each created a space of individual complexity that only we can negotiate only some of the time. |
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