Thursday, March 15, 2007

coping on the internet

My familiarity with computers and my concept of an "internet" started long ago with an idea, probably gained from the movie War Games in the 80's, of a private space that could be infiltrated by savvy teenaged hackers from a distant location. I typed away on my Commadore 64 imagining that the code I typed might access a secret portion of my floppy disk revealing military plans or connecting to a CIA computer, like in the movie Cloak and Dagger.
Phenomenological description: the internet is not an object but a concept and a skill set while I am coping in the web environment. While I am engaged in skillful activity it is difficult to call the tools - in this case the computer workstation - "objects". I am here at my workstation, but also there - engulfed in skillful coping on the net and with my tools and therefore, I am not a subject encountering an object in my experience (phenomenologically). The internet workstation can be an object of course, e.g. when I am new to computers, new to typing , or if it slips off the desk onto my bamboo floor. Then I am not engaged in the skillful activity of web browsing, but seperate from the workstation as a subject, and it appears to me as an object with distinguishable and distinct qualities.
But with language, and while skillfully coping - I am able to conceptually distinguish myself from the experience of writing to say that I was writing. But this is just to say that I can talk while engaged in skillful coping, because on some level I would agree that one is often skillfully coping, and talking, and even doing complicated stick-shift and foot pedals at the same time.... while imagining what dinner will be. One reads the word "blogging" while browsing and that it is good for business, or heard about it at a technology convention for realtors, and over time my background familiarity grew. Over time and the idea of blogging no longer seems beyond my capabilities. I heard that www.blogger.com was good early this morning. Now here I am am. Transparent typing?
IN PROGRESS