The Situation Is Critical

Elizabeth Dykstra

Copyright (c) 1991

The situation is critical. The situation is critical. Time wheels eternal on the outside, while on the inside the milliseconds clock furiously forward, directed, focussed, progressing one after another faster than those of us on the outside can imagine.

They put this box in here, this big one, Big Box, and a lot of little ones, and a mass of cables and cords that sometimes have little boxes on them, and they told us that this confusion is all really very orderly, very structured. It has an integrity of its own, we hear, this collection of machines. Computers. We are Friends. They're different, scores of them; some are quite large with big screens, like televiewers; some are like books, lap-slabs to open up and unfold. They have keyboards, and scribe globes, drawing tablets, 'lectro pens, voxboxes and mouses; datagloves, eyephones, earphones, and sensewear, umbilically connected like satellites to their mother stations, jacked in to Big Box, snaked to each other in patterns that give away the secrets of their relationships.

The curious ones are the ones that are so complex they appear to be very simple: the smallest Friend, just a smooth little box with click membranes and the ubiquitous snaking cables that shake hands with the other members present of this species that helps man in its own creation. This little Friend is profound in that it is nothing itself; it projects its offerings into thin air, a shadow computer to gateway its Friends into virtual worlds.

The urgency of the situation does not permit the luxury of understanding. To think, to speak, to act, to create, our language creating itself, shaping us as we find new experience in this clutter of technology. We cannot help but wonder how we found our old methods so small and pitiful. We talk, after all, we jot and scribble and gesture as our race has almost always done. The world grows newer around us every day, and we learn newer and more clever tricks, us old dogs.

We parse our time into events that happen simultaneously, so that time finally presents its enigmatic sense to us as the convoluted web it is, where the myriad sequences of tiks, toks and units merrily clock on and on in wondrous arhythmic dance. How do we find ourselves here, and now? This mystery, this mesh of machines, extends us and surprises us with the images we make of ourselves. We feed it, we support its health and welfare; we direct it and manipulate it with abandon, with bemusement, with trepidation, and we use it to externalize and negotiate our independent structures, as Friends.

We used to think that we related to the little boxes, on our way to electronic conversion and direct inter-think with Big Box. Yet in our crisis it is ever more apparent that these tools are media, messengers as fluid as the air around us, quick as our tongues, so that we play with each other, we poison each other, we influence, infiltrate, experience each other, we conceive through our activities our image of ourselves and learn how to grow it, to chop it into bits, to clone it, to arrive at new configurations, new constructions of ourselves; we build ourselves anew with competencies our history would have proscribed without the help of our Friends.

Each of us has grown close to special Friends, the ones we find accommodating to our tastes, the ones who find us similarly constructed. We gravitate toward pleasing satellites, we choose the methods that fit our models of ourselves. Some of us have no fingers, and have no use for interfaces requiring digitation; some of us do not or will not speak, or be spoken to; some of us cannot relate to the weird dimension-shifting of virtual datascapes. Some of us enjoy the sense of identity and power in command-response structures, while some of us refuse to accept another's imposed order, no matter how trivial or elegant. We all started with that uneasy mix of sensation, urgency and adventure, the slight queasiness associated with excitement and the unknown, with critical resolutions and formulations long overdue. As the climate grows more pressured to deal with the situation, we extend ourselves to each other ever further, our exchanges become less and less mechanically individuated as we recognize parts of ourselves repeating throughout the network.

That smell again -- the acrid warning smell of impending data loss -- I'll have to set aside a moment to check on that, view the scenario and maybe do a little reconstruction. The tape on my forehead itches a little, just enough for me to remember that it's there, and that this smell is its personal warning reminder to me. I naturally dislike this smell; I chose it for that reason, because I tend to brush away these small annoyances until they become quite larger. Some of us are more physical, we generally like the contact stimulus of metal, plasteel, glass, the satisfaction of resistance to touch, the click of keys. Friends often suggest small comforts between themselves.

I survey this environment, all of us Friends, and I wonder where they will take us next, where we will take ourselves, and what wonders we shall experience in the evolution of this science, this art of contact. I must get back to work. After all, the situation is critical. Indeed, it is critical; but again, after all, we are all Friends; Friends and Friends alike, and the crisis is ours.

Elizabeth Dykstra is a cybernetician at Pacific Bell where she researches group phenomena and computer interfaces. She lives in San Francisco and works in the dreaded East Bay desert, giving her lots of commute time to doze at the previously published in `Addenda and Errata' (1990, University of Amsterdam), a book of stories, anecdotes, and oddities by the Program Support, Survival and Culture at the University of Amsterdam where she lived and worked last year designing groupware.

eadykst@pbhyg.pacbell.com