Fragmentation
In Tara McPherson’s article, she connects two seemingly unrelated movements in history. In her analysis, she focuses on relating developments in computations to the organization of social life in the United States. McPherson argues that these outwardly unconnected “fragments” of society are in fact similar in their shift towards modularity. This shift represents a preference for compartmentalizing things in order to make it seem less complicated.
We are in what experts call the Information Age. It’s a time dominated by innovations in digital technologies and a drive towards making everything, smaller, faster, and more “efficient”. In this race to make things “better”, our American, capitalist society promotes and maintains competition in order to improve upon current technologies. In order to reach specific goals, industries become increasingly specialized which results in what McPherson refers to as “patterned isolation”. This occurs when structures and institutions are designed in ways that keep their parts separated. In looking at computation, this process is seen in the way computer systems are broken down into “modules”, units, or sub-programs that are meant to manage complexity.
Tara McPherson discusses in her article how this mindset of modularity is also present in the way we think and construct racial structures. Recall the pre-civil rights era where the U.S government championed the use of separate but equal facilities that were never actually equal. This implementation of racial segregation exacerbated racial tensions and ignored the social, economic, and legal problems that reinforced the oppression of the African- American community. This example of modularity demonstrates the negative influence of patterned isolation on the long-term well-being of a race.
Tara McPherson’s discussion of modularity demonstrates how technological development can be closely associated with racial formations. Her solution to the problem of oversimplifying complexities within these spaces is to historicize and politicize code studies. I agree with this solution because in looking at academic spaces where tech is taught, there is a lack of interdisciplinary study that ignores digital connections to race, class, gender,and sexuality.
digital feminisms 