Coding, language & history: how they all connect

William Gibson’s strange, but alluring, poem entitled Agrippa pulls the reader in like a Google search and doesn’t let her stop reading until she’s exhausted every tab (or line). Poems, an ancient form of artistic literature, have been continuously and persistently written for thousands of years, Homer being one of the earliest poets of our time on this planet with work dating back to ancient Greece. Gibson, a contemporary of Homer’s, transforms this tried and true art form into something that it has never achieved before which brings into question the genre Gibson is writing in because his poem transcends lines and stanzas to computer code. A reader might wonder if what Gibson wrote, essentially a documentation of his and his father’s childhood, is even a poem at all because it utilizes a different means of communication beyond a pen and paper: codes. Gibson is writing with a new language, one that only recently popped up in the 1980’s with the birth of the computer. What Gibson is doing in his poem is embracing the new technology that we have available to us today in order to communicate his narrative; the technology in ancient Greece was ink and papyrus, but our technology is a bunch of 1’s and 0’s on a glowing screen. While Gibson’s poem may not be considered a real “poem” because it wanders into a new media, I would argue that although it may not be considered a poem to the modern era, it is a poem to the postmodern era because computers are our new language.

Crispin Thurlow and Katherine Bell address our rapid evolution of language in their article “Against Technologicalization: Young People’s New Media Discourse as Creative Cultural Practice” because the rise of technological modes of communication such as texting, IM-ing, and emailing caused a bowdlerization of our vocabulary in order send our messages as efficiently as possible. Certain acronyms and abbreviations for words that did not exist a couple of decades ago are now seeped into the everyday American vocabulary because people are becoming accustomed to their modifications of phrases and words and using them lieu of the full term. Older generations scoff at this, but as language has dramatically evolved since Shakespearean times, it continues to evolve and adjust to the current culture. The changing of language is not a bad thing; it may seem weird to people who have been communicating the same way their entire life, but it is a natural process and is bound to continue to ebb and flow which is why I try to have a deeper understanding as to why teenagers say things like “I L Y” instead of “I love you”. Though irksome, that’s language for you and I cannot consider myself an expert at English Studies unless I understand language’s bizarre way of forming and deforming.

This leads to into one of Gitelman’s points about the internet: it is the ultimate test of preservation. The internet has all of the information a person could ever want and the issue in this is distinguishing what information, in this age where information spreads like the bubonic plague (is it the new plague?), is important. Ancient texts by the Greeks, early British playwrights, Puritans, and even Plath, were discovered over time as artifacts of human “history”; therefore, if something is published on the Internet (versus a book), can it survive as history? When all of human history is presented to a person on a tiny, illuminated screen, archeology goes from digging in the dirt to sifting through the endless amount of information that is easily and accessibly given to them. Present and future readers need to have the ability to navigate the outer-space vastness of the internet and be able to highlight the knowledge on the internet that is worth preserving—perhaps in a series of hyperlinks instead of a museum.