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Jeff Bellomi-Encoding Exercise

Page history last edited by Jeffrey Bellomi 9 years, 5 months ago

Building Blocks

 

 

After telling all of my friends back in Silicon Valley that I would be experimenting with coding for the first time due to a class project, they couldn't have looked more unenthused at the prospect, as the very act had become a quotidien activity or a type of second language that they speak with complete fluency. To me, there still is some semblance of an alchemical magic to the way in which these strings of commands coalesce to produce coherent images on the other side of the curtain, so to speak. Chalk it up to a naivety on my part, or a stunted sense of profundity, but I approached this with a certain sense of wonder. It's easy to post on a forum and customize text with the click of a few buttons, however the mechanisms that lay beneath these virtual switches remains obscured to people like myself and the other members of the old guard.

 

Those very buttons lie above this extended ramble on my experience, begging to be used for the very purpose for which they exist. So, to dive in behind the veil and write out strings of code myself seemed to have a bivalent sense of temporaility. A step backward into the older methods of encoding text, bypassing the convenient tools placed at my disposal, and at the same time launching myself into a future wherein the language of coding, something towards which I had long since been ignorant, could very well become a necessity. I feel old and young simultaneously, but is this anything out of the ordinary for someone who is 27? Even the shift to a new font such as the one in which I am typing now has offered me a fleeting sense of control over mechanisms that have remained opaque and obscured from my vision since the inception of the internet as we see it today.

 

But with each shift in font and color the system begins to reveal itself more and more and that sense of quotidien banality mentioned above starts to seep in. Typing out the string of commands for every paragraph break seems superfluous, and selecting my format and color by its specifically designated shade seems constricting in some strange fashion. Am I that inundated with the tools of convenience that I've lost the attentive capacity to find enjoyment in this process? Am I the target audience of The Phaedrus?

 

It's not as if I'm not learning from the aforementioned buttons above. Whenever a coding function wouldn't work, I would simply use the prescripted tools and then look at how the source code was altered, further bolstering that doubled sense of progress and regression. It's also not as if the system doesn't help the novice coder along with a forceful guiding hand. Anytime I would make a mistake, it would simply delete the incorrect code as if it never happened, erasing my errors from the history of this text. But maybe I wanted to see those errors, or at the very least the ways in which they manifested on the screen. Certainly I could shatter coherency at my leisure in a different text-encoding experimentation website, however I would have at least liked to see that Haylesian moment of scrambled transmission in real-time. No such luck.

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