A Second Byte of the Apple

Abstract

Although the impact of computers on society can be represented (by those very computers) in terms of statistics — numbers of jobs lost, for instance, or increases in productivity — I want to propose a different way of considering it, that is, in terms of the way that people interact with computers, and to suggest that there are several aspects of this interaction that are analogous to aspects of religion. The physical aspects of computers and their accommodation, the history of man’s connections with them, the beliefs that are held regarding them and the rituals that are employed in dealing with them can all be interpreted, albeit from an idiosyncratic viewpoint, as signs which support this view. In an attempt to justify this ‘idiosyncratic viewpoint’ I refer the reader to Roland Barthes and Umberto Eco. Concerning the ‘significant features’ with which the essays in Mythologies deal, Barthes writes ‘Is this a significance which I read into them?’¹ In other words is there a mythology of the mythologist? No doubt, and the reader will easily see where I stand. Umberto Eco, in the preface to Travels in Hyperreality writes ‘In these pages I try to interpret and to help others interpret some “signs”. These signs are not only words, or images; they can also be forms of social behaviour, political acts, artificial landscapes’.²