Exposing the mathematical underpinnings of the internet

I think Langlois’s observation that “the mathematical layer becomes a new mediator” (42) is a very rich one with the potential to illuminate inconsistencies and discontinuities present in new media. Her overarching agenda is to analyze the web as “as an assemblage of technocultural layers” (52), rather than sticking with the medium-theoretical approach of “identify[ing] one essential feature of a medium” (21). This layered view results in an understanding of new media as shaped by an ecology of technologies whose impact on transmitted messages, as well as effects on culture, are determined by each of the parts and the arrangement of the whole. Effects of each technological layer propagate upward, even from the quantum level of the underlying mathematical concepts behind computation.

If you have played one of the original Pokemon games, or even read Lewis Carroll’s logic puzzles, you may have noticed that there is a certain pleasurable blurring of boundaries when logical, computer driven processes are attached to cognitive objects which do not follow such strict rules as numbers. One puzzle, for example, reads:

(a) All babies are illogical.
(b) Nobody is despised who can manage a crocodile.
(c) Illogical persons are dispised.

…from which we are meant to conclude, of course, both that all babies are despised and that no baby can manage a crocodile. As explained at http://www.math.hawaii.edu/~hile/math100/logice.htm, the three declarations can be understood as statements about sets: if it belongs to the set of babies, it also belongs to the set of illogical things. From the three set-theoretical statements we can extrapolate further set-theoretical conclusions. And while, in this case, the conclusions one might reach are in fact logical, hanging somewhat messy everyday concepts on mathematical scaffolding still feels silly and strange.

And in the original Pokemon, the whole world followed rules laid out by the programmers of the game. Like the designers of any game, they tried to make a two-level structure: an outer one of characters, storylines, and images, and an inner one of the underlying computational logic that ties the story together, provides verbs to the user (like “to battle,” “to capture,” and “to explore”). But a glitch, often referred to as the Missingno glitch, allows you to obtain infinite copies of items in your inventory. This rupture in the logical fabric of the game makes everything tied together by it flimsy and strange.

To bring the discussion back to Langlois, the mathematical and logical foundations of the internet often break through in the same way as they do in logical puzzles and Pokemon. The technology which tries to be transparent is necessarily flawed or inconsistent: try as we might, 404 pages are commonplace and hyperlinks often do not link properly, and search engines yield irrelevant results. The mathematical and algorithmic underpinnings of the internet often poke through the smooth surface, exposing the processes which always participate in the mediation of information through it.