Word order By Lewis H Lapham

[xchrom]

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/ND24Dj02.html

I speak Spanish to God, Italian to women, French to men, and German to my horse.
- Emperor Charles V

But in which language does one speak to a machine, and what can be expected by way of response? The questions arise from the accelerating data streams out of which we've learned to draw the breath of life, posed in consultation with the equipment that scans the flesh and tracks the spirit, cues the ATM, the GPS, and the EKG, arranges the assignations on Match.com and the high-frequency trades at Goldman Sachs, catalogs the pornography and drives the car, tells us how and when and where to connect the dots and thus recognize ourselves as human beings.

Why then does it come to pass that the more data we collect - from Google, YouTube, and Facebook - the less likely we are to know what it means?

The conundrum is in line with the late Marshall McLuhan's noticing 50 years ago the presence of "an acoustic world", one with "no continuity, no homogeneity, no connections, no stasis", a new "information environment of which humanity has no experience whatever". He published Understanding Media in 1964, proceeding from the premise that "we become what we behold," that "we shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us."

[zbdent]

1. "But in which language does one speak to a machine"?

Java seems to catching on pretty well ...

[unc70]

2. Actually Java is declining in percentage, too.

Saw a report on language use in one of my technical journals recently. Java and C are "leading" with each still at really low levels -- around 1% if I remember. But there are hundreds of programming languages.