notes on the computer as text
The digital age offers us written texts in essentially two formats: luminous (or digital) and non-luminous (or traditional). Traditional written texts rely on the reflection of light from the writing surface; light strikes the page, and the areas of high and low spectral absorption are interpreted by our eyes and brains as characters, words, paragraphs. Digital written texts rely on the luminosity of the screen; light travels from the screen towards our eyes, and those areas in which the light was modified or absent allows us to perceive characters and colors. This is why many people have difficulty reading long texts on a computer screen — it simply isn't the same material process as traditional reading.
One way to think of the computer is as a cluster of interactive, dynamic texts. The most dynamic is the screen itself; this is the text of human-to-human or human-to-machine interaction. Your screen contains the entire virtual world. Next is random access memory, or RAM, to which data is written and recalled as needed. RAM is a kind of text, and a particularly fascinating one, because its contents are temporary by design.
Next, the hard drive. We move further from the human component in computing, as well as further from dynamism. Data is electromagnetically written to sectors on the surface of the disk; some of this data is protected, unchangeable, available in read-only form. It is a luminous kind of text in that its contents are still partially dynamic and reliant upon digital and electrical components; much like a blackboard, it is possible to wipe the hard drive clean.
Then the processor. This is traditional writing, non-luminous. The processor consists of a silicon surface upon which pathways have been etched — written — in order to perform floating-point operations. This is the binary machine-to-machine language, as static (or dynamic) as a book or a newspaper. It is the core of the machine, upon which all of the functions of hard drive, RAM, screen and the like are built.
The core of what we do here, therefore, is textual.