New media thrives off active consumption

While all of the articles commented on the roles we take as computer-augmentation beneficiaries (technobodies), none of them fully addressed the role of the programmer. Computer code may not require the most exquisite and efficient form conceivable, it certainly demands acceptable syntax and procedure. There becomes a conflict between the immaculate and the hack: a question of right/wrong even though both get the job done. This is pushed to "a relaxed attitude toward sentence fragments and typographic errors", leading to the assumption that we've forgotten how to write. Reading into the effects of technology on identity, Turkle comments that "computer science has contributed to [a] new way of talking": paths, like circuits, marked by the programs we run and how manipulate them. Like a good software program, the out identities must be multiple as we are forced to multi-task and diversify in order to survive. This is no longer a society of individualized, do-only-this-and-go-home career system. As e-media majors, especially, we must hone a plethora skills in order to be marketable. The cosmic implications are readily apparent within the program: your photo editor loads an entire toolkit of smaller applications designed to capture and refine your images, each likely coded by separate programmers. All of this runs on a system built of object on top of object, each determined to run properly without complete knowledge of the environment they are running within. We, too, act as objects within our own systems, and whatever control there is either given inherently in the form of permissions or taken by some exploitation of the working environ. Turkle points out how these program politics have manifested themselves through MUD hackers like Mr. Bungle: whose understanding of the command system allowed him to digitally rape other users. Even the programmers, the assumed gods of the medium, did not have the panoptic ability to observe every bitwise movement of the attacker. Internet content is much like any other artistic medium in that it can choose to integrate more than pure spectacle - it can assume mathematical, philosophical, and political positions, as well intrinsic flaws. With every new digital structure there becomes greater opportunity and choice. You are the child of binary; embrace your future.