What Came First, the Chick Lit or the Blog?

Abstract

Every technological revolution is accompanied by an allied fear; the fear of human redundancy. Innovations in computer manufacture and software design provide manifold evidence of the power of human ingenuity. At the same time, these new products and the new capabilities they permit have the capacity to render people, or at least their roles, superfluous. After all, we invent machines precisely so that they might take over the jobs we are reluctant or unable to do. Computers are no exception to this, used to analyse data and make complex calculations, as well as the more elementary matters of spelling or managing appointments. Since we expect our computers to share in our day-today responsibilities in this way, a form of interdependence develops — the computer becomes both subservient to our instructions and the driving force behind our needs. For techno-sceptics, however, the extension of this relationship is a feared scenario in which machines might ultimately ‘take over’. Whether forged out of probability or paranoia, the concept is based on an innate suspicion that machines, including computers, have a life of their own. The threat of living machines, a staple of science fiction and sensationalist journalism, reflects an anxiety that we are only barely in control of the products of our imaginations. In the age of surgical robots and artificial intelligence, our contemporary anxieties have been allowed to grow out of gothic roots.

I don’t know where dead websites go. Perhaps they are not dead in any real sense, just lost, or inaccessible. This worries me — if the Internet is to evolve, surely it must both reproduce and die.

(Enright, 2000, p.3)