Disembodied Movement, Structure Info. & Web 2.0, Subversive Language

1. Hayles discusses the shift toward disembodiment by cybernetics and how that shift relates to subjectivity. For cybernetics to equate humans with machines, subjectivity needs to lose its body.

Hayles thus brings up Gibson's "point of view" as a disembodied way of experiencing subjectivity:
"pov is a substantive noun that constitutes the character's subjectivity by serving as a positional marker substituting for his absent body" (37).

The "positional marker" thus navigates through information to create the informatic narrative (or pattern) that now supersedes presence as subjectivity:
"Narrative becomes possible when this spatiality is given temporal dimension by the pov's movement through it" (38).
AND
"the dataspace is narrativized by the povs movement through it" (39).

In this sense, what does Hayles regards as movement? She gives the example of Gibson's characters jacking into a neural network and traversing the system from there, but more specifically, what does disembodied movement constitute?

Could another example be the machine's tagging a corpus of text, or the human's click-history through Wikipedia? Are these informatic narratives as well?

2. After watching "Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/ing Us" for our first class, MacKay's suggestion of information theory (that was apparently confined to British academics) piqued my interest.

The YouTube video suggests the movement from a syntactic web (Web 1.0 dominated by HTML
formatting of data) to a semantic web (Web 2.0 dominated by XML formatting of data) is forming a super linked structure that we help create by defining relationships between data.

MacKay tried to push information theory from a contextless theory to one that involved selective information and structural information (in essence, providing semantics to raw data):
"The information content of this message, considered as selective information (measured in "metrons").... structural information (mesaured in "logons"), for it indicates that the preceding message has a kind of structure rather than another" (55).

Are these two shifts similar in nature? Does Web 2.0 incorporate this observer MacKay strives to include (or for that matter, reflexivity in general)? How were these two shift's goals different/the same?

3. Hayles also writes about cybernetics attempts to equate humans with computers (at least in terms of function). To do this, cybernetics tries to erase all traits humans and machines cannot share (specifically the body). This leaves language (code, mathematical models) as a way of connecting the two. But machines cannot understand "ambiguous" language since they
need formal language to execute commands and still function.

"The common ground that humans and machines share is identified with the univocality of an instrumental language that has banished ambiguity from its lexicon" (67).

Use of language by human and machines creates a "universality [that] is achieved by bracketing or 'black-boxing' the specific mechanism" (60).

Yet, I still assume language can be subversive in these situations (e.g., sending a double encoded message that a machine only understands one meaning but allows a human to read two meanings). Are only embodied beings able to decode these messages? Would such
messages constitute the new anti-Turing test?