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Electric Amateurs Literary encounters with computing technologies 1987-2001 Dorothy Butchard PhD in English Literature The University of Edinburgh 2015 DECLARATION is is to certify that the work contained within has been composed by me and is entirely my own work. No part of this thesis has been submitted for any other degree or professional quali"cation. ABSTRACT is thesis considers the portrayal of uncertain or amateur encounters with new technologies in the late twentieth century. Focusing on "ctional responses to the incipient technological and cultural changes wrought by the rise of the personal computer, I demonstrate how authors during this period drew on experiences of empowerment and uncertainty to convey the impact of a period of intense technological transition. From the increasing availability of word processing software in the 1980s to the exponential popularity of the “World Wide Web”, I explore how perceptions of an “information revolution” tended to emphasise the increasing speed, ease and expansiveness of global communications, while more doubtful commentators expressed anxieties about the pace and effects of technological change. Critical approaches to the cultural impact of computing technologies have tended to overlook the role played by perceptions of expertise and familiarity, and my thesis seeks to redress this by identifying a broad range of imagery, language and cultural references used to depict amateur or inexpert encounters with computing technologies. My interest in literary representations of amateur or marginalised users of computing technology reveals how the ease and speed of reading and writing promised by technological expertise can be countered by uncertainty arising from limited understanding of the complex processes involved. In a pre-smartphone age, the computer loomed as an object which was simultaneously baffling and enchanting, "lled with potential but also obscure in its fundamental workings. Examining instances within experimental literary "ction and poetry which portray, imply, or respond to, encounters with personal computing, I demonstrate how individuals’ attempts to understand a technologically-in%ected world can be described and enacted by the use of unusual narrative and poetic devices, where experimental literary strategies work to recreate the complex sensations associated with thrilling, difficult, or incomprehensible aspects of information technologies. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS anks to the Arts and Humanities Research Council for the studentship which enabled me to write this thesis, and to my superb supervisors at the University of Edinburgh, Lee Spinks and Andrew Taylor, whose advice and encouragement was invaluable throughout my PhD. I would not have reached this point without the love and support of my outstanding family, and I owe special thanks to Andrew Campbell, Rob Lederer, Camilla Born, Natalie Pollard, Clara Dawson, Jessamy Reynolds, Matthew Ward, Elysse Meredith and many others for bringing the perfect mixture of fun, support and inspiration – especially in the "nal phase! anks to the Library of Congress for three months’ invaluable research, the British Library, National Library of Scotland, and other institutions where I have been able to locate vital books. My time as an undergraduate was not easy, and I’d like to express my gratitude to everyone who helped me through, with particular thanks to Tim Cribb, Priyamvada Gopal and Andrew Taylor for encouraging me to continue on to postgraduate study. – Finally, my heartfelt thanks to Fred Gale, for your unstinting help and guidance when I needed it most. CONTENTS Introduction 1 Chapter 1: Word Processing Power 28 Chapter 2: System Opacity 73 Chapter 3: Digital Exotic 117 Chapter 4: Speed is Everything 157 Conclusion 204 Bibliography 210 INTRODUCTION Don DeLillo’s 1997 novel Underworld ends with a climactic vision of an online environment in which “everybody is everywhere at once” (808). Subtitled “Keystroke 2,” the novel’s concluding section imagines an electronic afterlife for “cold war nun” Sister Edgar (245). After her death, Edgar attains a posthumous existence on the internet, where she is “exposed to every connection you can make on the world wide web”: ere is no space or time out here, or in here, or wherever she is. ere are only connections. Everything is connected. All human knowledge gathered and linked, hyperlinked, this site leading to that, this fact referenced to that, a keystroke, a mouse-click, a password— world without end, amen. But she is in cyberspace, not heaven, and she feels the grip of systems. […] When you decide on a whim to visit the H-bomb home page, she begins to understand. Everything in your computer, the plastic, silicon and mylar, every logical operation and processing function, the memory, the hardware, the software, the ones and zeroes, the triads inside the pixels that form the on-screen image—it all culminates here. (DeLillo, Underworld 825) Intertwining Edgar’s haunting presence with imagery of an atomic explosion, Underworld’s conclusion contemplates the dangerous allure of connectivity by aligning the “coupling” of hyperlinks with the fusion of nuclear power. Like several of the texts I discuss in this thesis, DeLillo’s portrayal of the Web in Underworld is in%uenced by 1980s cyberpunk, and the limitless connectivity of this version of the Web recalls William Gibson’s conception of cyberspace as “[l]ines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data” (Gibson, Neuromancer 67). However, unlike the rare"ed “nonspace” portrayed in Neuromancer, DeLillo’s reference to the constituent parts of “your computer” returns this vast array of “ones and zeroes” to its basis in a solid object, a computer which faces the individual as part of a domestic environment. “[Y]ou look at the things in the room,” the novel concludes, “offscreen, unwebbed […] you try to imagine the word on the screen becoming a thing in the world” (827). e penultimate passages of Underworld treat the Web and the technological systems by which it is accessed with wary scepticism, warning that “intersecting systems help pull us apart” (826).1 is "nal section of the epilogue reworks DeLillo’s 1994 short story “e Angel Esmeralda”, and several passages remain identical to the earlier work, tracing the movements of two nuns through a deprived area of the Bronx before concluding with the seemingly miraculous vision of a murdered girl’s face on a billboard. However, whereas “e Angel Esmeralda” never mentions computing technologies, references to the impact of personal computing and the Web are spliced throughout the Underworld epilogue, where Sister Edgar’s transcendent recon"guration in cyberspace is framed by the italicised subtitles “Keystroke 1” and “Keystroke 2,” and introduced via direct address to an unnamed computer user. is technique invites slippage between online “lurker” Jeff, who discovers Sister Edgar’s vision after he types in “seventeen characters and then dot com miraculum” (807), and the novel’s reader, who is "guratively invited into a similar encounter as the section opens with the faux-url “http:blk.www/dd.com/miraculum” (810). e inclusion of extended references to computing technologies in Underworld’s epilogue suggests that DeLillo had devoted serious contemplation to the rise of the Web in the years between the publication of “e Angel Esmeralda” and its transformation into a conclusion for Underworld.2 During this time, the social, cultural and economic impact of the rise of personal computing and the Web exploded into popular consciousness, and the introduction of computing technology and the “world wide web” in DeLillo’s reworking of his earlier short story captures a number of signi"cant changes in perspectives on computing technologies. For example, the increasing availability of personal 1 Although I read these passages as a sceptical portrayal of newly “connective” technologies, others have taken DeLillo’s declaration that “[e]verything is connected” at face value. Tony Tanner calls the "nal pages of Underworld a regression into “sentimental piety” (Tanner 70), while James Annesley suggests that “Sister Edgar is swept away into an internet nirvana, a world where science, economics and mysticism intersect,” and "nds it strange that “[i]dentity, religion and technology combine to produce this curious technological apotheosis” (Annesley 71). I disagree with these evaluations, since the epilogue to Underworld consistently undercuts the glib rhetoric of its own statements about connectivity. is is evident, for example, in the sinister alignment of hyperlinks with the destructive capacities of nuclear fusion, repeated reminders that “intersecting systems” promote disjunction, and the acknowledgement that the "nal word which appears onscreen, “Peace”, is “only a sequence of pulses on a dullish screen and all it can do is make you pensive” (827). 2 e importance of DeLillo’s reworking of “e Angel Esmeralda” is further emphasised by the fact that other stories – “Panko at the Wall”, “Sputnik” – are included in Underworld without any signi"cant alteration. 2 computers and access to the Web during the mid-nineties is re%ected in DeLillo’s portrayal of Ismael, a local entrepreneur who is convinced that his sales of scrap metal will be multiplied if he is able to acquire a computer.