Tuesday, September 1, 2009

Binary logic in technology~ enter www

Online networks lend a unique new landscape for communities to flourish. I say that the world wide web is unique because it both closes off as well as makes limitless discussion, expression and interpretation.
Technology and online forums are both by their very making binary and rigid and yet forever expanding. Programs and websites, servers, forums and chatrooms all function within a coding system based within binaries of "yes" and "no", "correct" and "incorrect". Like computers, I imagine how everything that we experience online is through 1's and 0's, making up a grand metrix that looks like endless possibility and flexibility. In programming, this might look like: "If user presses the # key, flash the screen". Then the computer checks: "Is the # key pressed (Yes or no). Yes: Flash screen". Why is this interesting? Well, I find this interesting because it reminds me sort of how simplistic forms of technology (like moving pictures/movies) started with this similar binary sort of method of splashing up either white light or darkness on a screen with millions of pixels to create an image and make it move. If you look up close you can see that the entire complex film that you just watched was entirely shown with just a series of white flashing dots.
Although we have found color in our modern day moving pictures, I find it interesting to see how limited this method really is. Technology to me still feels like it is stuck in a binary approach, which does not allign itself well with non technological events like sickness and disease, species variation, cycles of the weather or evolution. So many aspects of the world live outside of a binary approach and yet technology has yet to really move past this.

Getting back to the internet. Although the foundations of the world wide web are still harnassed by binary laws of yes and no, I wonder if the internet is stretching those boundaries and helping in the creation of something new, something to finally get our imaginations to stretch further beyond binaries and even spectrums.
The difference between servers and clients are stressed as online games test the capacities for real-time online battles where users move too fast for the server to handle and users have different perspectives of the online reality. It is no longer a simple "yes" or "no", and is instead a series of varying realities. Profiles are created and then years later snippets of information linger on websites that pulled information from one page from another page. Websites are fragmented and disassembled and yet shared and re-produced to create Frankenstein-like discussions.
It is as if the speed of the www's growth has stressed the capacities of the "yes" "no" language. After so many decades of change in technological advances, I am intrigued with the potential shift from our binary foundations.