Computers

Humans have used computing devices for millennia. The abacus is a common example, but the fact that we use a base-10 numbering system surely indicates that the fingers predated even that as a tool for computation. Through the years we have invented an amazing array of machines to help us compute things more rapidly and more accurately.

Basic Character

The digital computer (which is what we now mean by “computer”) is not simply another computing device among these machines. Only a few decades ago International Business Machines estimated that the total American demand for digital computers was about a dozen. This estimate was not the result of a mere miscalculation but based on a very basic misunderstanding: IBM falsely thought that digital computers were just another computing device.

In spite of the fact that we routinely call these machines “computers,” they only began their lives that way. They are not simply computing devices. Though computation is at the core of many operations that computers do, they are really not computers but “rememberers.”

As never before, digital computers offer us devices to remember information. From the invention of writing and before, humans used the means at their disposal to record information in hopes that it would be remembered. But merely recording is itself insufficient. In order to remember and reuse information, it must be retrieved as well as recorded.

Computers have given us this capability to store information so that it can be easily retrieved and reused. Monthly credit card bills are mundane examples of computers’ role as rememberers. So are the reams of “junk mail” sometimes generated by attempts to recycle the information that computers remember for us.

As more and more information becomes available to us over computer networks, the role that computers play as rememberers will become ever more significant. Not only will they be the means by which we store and retrieve information; they will also be the tools that allow us to navigate around the world’s enormous information stores to find just the knowledge we need.

Rapid Proliferation

Counting the embedded systems that control our automobile engines, VCRs and telephone systems, there are more computers in the United States than people. Even the number of recognizable computer systems like the one I am using to write this article numbers in the millions.

The demand for computers, and their power, seems to know few bounds. The state-of-the-practice computer from my college days, the IBM 370, cost a great deal, could be used only in a controlled environment and could be approached only from a distance, punched cards in hand.

One watershed came in the early 1980s when significant computing power could first be reduced to a small set of integrated circuits. These “personal computers” were first popular with hobbyists but came into more mainstream use when software such as Lotus 1-2-3 and WordStar made them capable of doing significant business tasks like budgeting and correspondence. This confluence of relatively inexpensive hardware and software that made it easier to do standard business tasks began to bring computers out of the laboratories and into everyday life.

As computers have become more powerful, most of that power has been expended making them more accessible. Cryptic commands, and before them setting control panel switches, have been replaced by icons that perform basic functions. The early personal computers responded to the command pip (peripheral interchange program) to copy a file. Now they respond to “dragging and dropping” a file icon onto a disk icon. Soon they will respond to the spoken command “Copy my file to the disk.” This increasing ease of use has made computers more accessible and has itself contributed to their omnipresence in modern life.

Current Uses

If computers have become our chief rememberers, it should be relatively easy to list the tasks they perform. This is far from true. Any simple categorization of current uses of computers seems to leave out important segments of their domain. And even complete lists become rapidly incomplete as new applications for computing power are discovered. Consider, however, this list, which a mainstream business user might put together: numeric projection and accounting (spreadsheets); transaction and information tracking (database); communication and messaging (electronic mail); text editing and publishing (word processing); drawing and image manipulation (graphics).

This list is based on the content of software “suites” which claim to offer a well-rounded set of resources for business. Several aspects of this list are remarkable. First, only one of these functions has directly to do with computing narrowly defined. Spreadsheets are the contemporary number-crunching functions of computers. The other functions, although they may be highly numeric under the surface, have entirely to do with storing, manipulating and retrieving other types of information.

Second, the list leaves out one of the most widespread uses of computers—information presentation. This domain includes computer-based training but is much broader. Computers drive much “kiosk” information display, designed to communicate to casual passersby rather than dedicated students. In this case too, however, the intent is to inform and instruct, and computers do the job for us.

Social Impact

As digital computers have become ubiquitous, they have transformed social life in many remarkable ways. Of course one must be “computer literate” to be considered educated, but that is one of the least important social impacts of computers. The significant ways in which they are transforming society are often much more subtle.

First, consider the kinds of information we can easily communicate to each other using traditional means. The book you are now reading, like many books, is trying to communicate information. But books are very good at communicating only certain kinds of information. Information that is “linear,” where one piece builds upon the previous piece, can be easily rendered in books. So can information that is hierarchical or layered.

What about information that is networked together arbitrarily? The only way books can render such information linkages is with cross-references. Most readers find cross-references annoying because they are so inconvenient to use. But when information is rendered using computers rather than printed books, hyperlinks allow readers to conveniently go back and forth across cross-references. This opens up whole worlds of information that, while they may have existed before, were virtually inaccessible because they were so inconvenient to use.

Second, computers make all information, whether we could easily communicate it before them or not, more available. When cashiers ask me for some sort of ID, as I let my wallet disgorge all the pieces of plastic and paper that tell who I am, I sometimes joke that I am one of the most thoroughly identified people in the world.

The truth of the matter is that the widespread use of computers has caused us all to be more thoroughly “identified” than we might like. Credit history, affiliations and police records for each of us are all out there on computers. This wealth of information is far more available than ever before, even when it is kept relatively confidential. Computers have made our thorough identification what it is.

Third, because computers have made so much information available to so many people, we will soon be forced to use them to sort through all that information. This role is very different from the one they play now as rememberers. When information is relatively limited, storing and retrieving it is adequate. When it becomes relatively unlimited, as it is becoming today, we must begin to use computers to filter it.

Filtering is different from retrieval because when computers retrieve information for us they do so in response to our specifications. Filtering, however, requires us to train computers to do our specifying for us. The available information will soon be so vast that, in order to find anything at all, we will have to trust computers to sift through things for us and return with what we need.

From one point of view, a computer is just another tool that can be used for both good and evil. And so it is. Such tools, however, always put their stamp on our activities and change them whether we like it or not. As our computers remember more and more information, we ourselves suffer from acute information overload. What are we to make of the power that inexpensive computers put into the hands of many of us? Clearly, they make many tasks easier; they also make some more complex. In some cases, they add a much-needed medium of personal communication, e-mail, that enables us to keep in touch with each other. In some cases, they add an impersonalness even to our personal communications. Now, after all, it’s possible to get form letters from your family.

The challenge we face as Christians is to make use of our computers to enhance our communication with others and our abilities to negotiate our lives successfully. But enhancing life and communication is not part of the “out-of-box experience” of unpacking a new computer. We add that capability to the machine or allow the machine to take it out of the activities we use it for. Our task is to direct these resources in ways similar to the direction we give to writing by hand or any other tool we use for tracking and communicating. Computers do the same things so much faster, but they require the same deliberate management as do lower technologies. There are further Christian reflections on the mixed blessing of this technology in the article on Information Superhighway.

» See also: Computer Games

» See also: Principalities and Powers

» See also: System

» See also: Technology

References and Resources

N. Negroponte, Being Digital (New York: Knopf, 1995)

—Hal Miller