Reading comprehension home exercise-20 PASSAGE B

 In the past decade, the computer culture has been the site of a series of battles over contested terrains. There have been struggles between formal logic and bricolage, about profound disruptions in our traditional ways of categorizing people and things, and about the nature of the real in a culture of simulation. These struggles marked the three sections of this book, in which we have seen the computer as tool, as mirror, and as gateway to a world through the looking glass of the screen. In each of these domains we are experiencing a complex interweaving of modern and postmodern, calculation and stimulation. The tensions are palpable.

In the struggle of epistemologies, the computer is caught between its natural pluralism and the fact that certain styles of computing are more culturally resonant than others.

 On one hand, the computer encourages a natural diversity of responses. Different people make the computer their own in their own ways. On the other hand, computers are increasingly expressing a constellation of ideas associated with postmodernism, which has been called our new cultural dominant. We have moved in the direction of accepting the postmodern values of opacity, playful experimentation, and navigation of surface as privileged ways of knowing.

In the contest over where the computer fits into categories such as what is or is not intelligent, alive or person-like, the game is still very much in play. Here, too, we saw tension. In one context people treat the machine as sentient, another; in a different context they insists on its “other-ness.” As people have become more comfortable psychologising computers and have come to grant them a certain capacity for intelligence, the boundary dispute between people and machines now falls on the question of life.

The final contest concerns the notion of the real. In simulated science experiments, virtual chemicals are poured from virtual backers, and virtual light bounces off virtual walls. In financial transactions, virtual money changes hands. In film and photography, realistic- looking images depict scenes that never took place between people who never met. And on the networked computers of our everyday lives, people have compelling interactions that are entirely dependent on their online self- representations. In cyberspace, hundreds of thousands, perhaps already millions, of users create online personae who live in a diverse group of virtual communities where the routine formation of multiple identifies undermines any notion of a real and unitary self. Yet the notion of the real fights back. 

People who live parallel lives on the screen are nevertheless bound by the descries, pain, and mortality of their physical selves. Virtual communities offer a dramatic new context in which to think about human identity in the age of the internet. They are spaces for learning about the lived meaning of a culture of simulation. Will it be a separate world where people get lost in the surfaces or will we learn to see how the real and the virtual can be made permeable, each having the potential for enriching and expanding the other. The citizens of MUDs are our pioneers.

As we stand on the boundary between the real and the virtual our experience recalls what the anthropologist Victor Turner termed a luminal moment f passage when new cultural symbols and meanings can emerge. Luminal moments are times of tension, extreme reactions, and great opportunity. In our time, we are simultaneously flooded with predictions of doom and predictions of imminent utopia. We live in a crucible of contradictory experience. When Turner talked about luminosity, he understood it as a transitional state- but living with flux may no longer be temporary. Donna Haraway’s characterization of irony illuminates our situation: “Irony is about contradictions that do not resolve into larger wholes….. About the tension of holding incompatible things together because both or all are necessary and true”. It is fitting that the story of the technology that is bringing postmodernism down to earth itself refuses modernist resolutions and requires openness to multiple viewpoints.

1.       Which of the following does not represent a post-mortem value?

A.      Opacity

B.      Experimentation

C.      Surface navigation

D.      Knowing

2.       The term “Psychologising “ as used here will most likely mean

A.      Making computers psychological

B.      Robotizing computers to make them perform human tasks.

C.      Imparting the computers hitherto human qualities.

D.      Treating computers with great consideration and respect

3.       Luminal moments are

A.      A time of great challenges and opportunities.

B.      Times of enlightenment.

C.      Quite rare, by definition.

D.      Moments of contradictory thinking.

4.       It can be inferred from the article that

A.      This piece is a part of a book.

B.      Computers are caught in a kind of struggle between natural pluralism and computing systems.

C.      The game is very much on in respect of which category the computer fits into.

D.      None of these.

5.       The tone of the author is marked by

A.      Enthusiasm

B.      Passion

C.      Callousness

D.      Analysis

Answer:

1.       D   “… postmodern values of opacity, playful experimentation, and navigation of surface as privileged ways of knowing...”

2.       C   Please refer to the third paragraph, concluding lines.

3.       A   “…. Termed a luminal moment of passage when new cultural symbols and meanings can emerge”.

4.       D    None of the options given is justifiable.

5.       D   the author is neither inclined towards nor against the subject matter, choosing instead to merely presenting it in a neutral manner. Hence D.