the medium is the message

In Plant's discussion on weaving, she foregrounds the process of production rather than the result because the patterns in cloths are "implicit in a web which makes them immanent to the processes from which they emerge" (67). She makes a parallel argument about binary code. The zeros and ones that compose the Net are the Net themselves.

Plant makes an analogy on page 127: "If computers are the power looms of the modern industrial revolution, software is more like knitting." Thus, the process of programming code to correspond to the on/off switches (the ones and zeros) of silicon chips is akin to the process of weaving thread to create cloth, which is identical to its process.

I found that this analogy helps elucidate Katherine Hayles' concept of the flickering signifier and her argument that we must consider the embodiment of information. Plant mentions that "the keystrokes of users on the Net connect them to a vast distributed plane composed not merely of computers, users, and telephone lines, but all the zeros and ones of machine code" (143). That is, the signifiers of the keyboard correspond to a layer of coded signifieds that in turn signify layer upon layer of code, leading back to the zeros and ones that determine the passage of electrical impulses which are themselves signifiers.

I second Patrick's desire to see this text digitized, in order to enact the kind of weaving that Plant describes that is immanent in hypertext. The fact that this text is out of print enacts the relegation to footnotes of women mathematicians and programmers that Plant subverts throughout the book. To paraphrase Ada Lovelace, it would be preferable to see this text digitized in order that we wouldn't have to be acquainted with this text through the medium of pen, ink, and paper merely (20).