Turing galaxy
Turing galaxy describes a world that is fundamentally shaped by the networked computer as the main medium , analogous to Marshall McLuhan's Gutenberg galaxy .
Origin of the term
The concept of the Turing galaxy was introduced by Wolfgang Coy in 1993 in a lecture entitled “The Turing galaxy. Computer as Media ” at the Interface II conference in Hamburg. Coy writes:
“More than a hundred million personal computers were built in the 1980s. They form the basis of a media revolution that assigns these programmable machines their historical perspective. This revolution was not brought about by the mainframe computers of the first, second and third generation , the use of which was restricted to large companies and administrations, but by the PCs. ... The PC has developed into a fully usable new medium that can simulate and replace all other media. We are at the beginning of a culturally subversive process that will unfold for many decades to come. "
Analogous to McLuhan's Gutenberg Galaxis , the Deonym Turing Galaxis uses the innovator's name to denote the media-historical epoch that shaped his innovation. With his invention of movable type printing, Johannes Gutenberg set off a dynamic that, according to McLuhan's analysis, had a direct impact on the Reformation, the Enlightenment, modern science, civil society and capitalism.
According to Coys' analysis, the universal machine that the British mathematician Alan Turing devised in 1936 emanates similar fundamental changes . Turing wanted to solve the question of predictability , which is fundamental to mathematics . To this end, in the essay On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Decision-Making Problem , he designed a thought machine , now known as the Turing machine , which is capable of solving any imaginable mathematical problem with just three basic operations, provided that it is also through an algorithm can be solved ”( Coy 1994 ).
In principle, the universal Turing machine itself cannot be built, if only because of its infinite writing tape. But the calculation rules of this machine are the basis of every computer today and thus of the media era that it shaped.
"Alan M. Turing completes the Gutenberg system of typesetting / printing by asking the seemingly peripheral question: 'What is a computable function (an algorithm)?' answered. [...] The Turing / Churchian thesis states that all specifications of the intuitive term 'predictability' lead to a definition equivalent to the Turing machine. The Turing machine shows its explosive power through its technical realization in the computer. The von Neumann architecture is modeled on the Turing machine. […] The (algorithmically) describable action becomes in Turing's world of thought and in its image on the computer an action that can be carried out by machine. "
This action, writes Coy, shows itself first as a new form of the transformation of writing, then in the form of the automat as a transformation of sensor data into actions of robotic arms etc. and finally through networking as a transformation of much that is thinkable or everything that can be stored medially into the digital Universal medium.
“Turing was sure of the potential of his universal calculating machine. Just as (the early) Wittgenstein saw the 'sayable' as describable through logical connections of elementary sentences, Turing seemed to be able to grasp everything 'thinkable' through a programmable algorithm, a universal Turing machine. The Gutenberg galaxy of static print media merges into the Turing galaxy of dynamic programmable media. "
Related terms from prehistory
It was first noticed in the 1920s and 1930s that new cultural and social conditions emerged from the Gutenberg galaxy through innovations in media technology. Bertolt Brecht formulated this perception in his radio theory . Walter Benjamin based his theory of the age of technical reproducibility of works of art primarily on the new medium of film.
Tesla galaxy
For the independent media-cultural epoch between the book-time and the digital galaxy, which is characterized by the electrical and chemical innovations in image and sound media, no name has yet been able to establish itself. McLuhan spoke of the "Age of Marconi". The sociologist Manuel Castells described the configuration characterized by television as the McLuhan galaxy . In doing so, however, he does not take a media-technological innovator, but the media-scientific analyst of the era as its namesake. Meanwhile, Nikola Tesla , bypassed by the story and by the US patent office, has been rehabilitated. Since he and not Guglielmo Marconi is recognized as the inventor of the radio or, according to his biographer, for the entire 20th century, this epoch could be described as the Tesla Galaxy .
Post Gutenberg Galaxy
In the 1950s, a fundamental social change was perceived again, this time already under the sign of the computer. The atomic age, that of the cyber nation, the information society (Yujiro Hayashi, 1969) and the post-industrial society ( Daniel Bell 1973) are among the attempts to give the epoch a name.
Many observers initially only referred to the new as the post-Gutenberg era. In 1987, Wolfgang Coy asked about a "Post-Gutenbergian Era". In the essay From QWERTY to WYSIWYG - Texts, Keyboard & Paper , he analyzed the new writing system, because that is exactly what the computer is, and by no means a reading device. The writing process will be machineized once more. Reading is not on the screen, but on the paper printout. He therefore criticizes the writing guild, which believed that Bibles on diskette threatened their essence.
“The real attack on writing does not come from the computers: it is the old attack of images and sounds on text, a counterattack, since writing was and is an attack on images and sounds, and its means and media are comparatively old and well-known: film, television, radio, record. "
In the essay, Coy describes the new machine text operations made possible by the computer (searching, sorting, spelling and style checking, designing, formatting, desktop publishing , right through to the possibility of automatic text generation). But in addition to changes on paper, computer-aided word processing also has powers that go beyond book production: “The most important concerns non-linear reading.” And he concluded his reflections in 1987 with the question: “Should the electronic footnote be the beginning of the post -Gutenbergian Era? "
However, the term achieved the greatest circulation through the cognitive scientist Stevan Harnad , who in his 1991 essay The Post-Gutenberg Galaxy analyzed electronic writing as the fourth revolution in the means of production of knowledge after the invention of language, writing and the art of printing. In 1995 the media theorist Norbert Bolz said goodbye to Gutenberg's world of writing and set off into the world of hypermedia ( At the end of the Gutenberg galaxy ).
Term coining Turing galaxy
The digital revolution achieved a broad social impact with the spread of PCs in the 1980s and the Internet in the 1990s. It was not by chance that Alan Turing's work for cultural and media studies was discovered during this time . Until then, references to Turing can only be found in the mathematical and computer science literature. In computer historiography, Turing's name had disappeared after John von Neumann's .
The person and the work of Turing were first made accessible in the biography of Andrew Hodges (1983, German 1989), who for the first time had access to original documents that had just been declassified. In the German-speaking countries, the compilation and translation of Turing's writings, which can be read without mathematical upgrading, by Bernhard Dotzler and Friedrich Kittler in 1987 was a key event. In 1992 Harry Harrison and Marvin Minsky published the novel The Turing Option .
The first to make Turing an era marker was Jay David Bolter with his Turing's Man. Western Culture in the Computer Age (1984, German 1990). At a time when, as he writes, most lay people have never been in the same room with a computer, he foresees that the computer ...
“[...] will be a principal medium of communication for the educated community of Europe and North America. The philosophy and fiction of the next hundred years will be written at the keyboard of a computer terminal, edited by a program, and printed under electronic control. "
According to Bolter, the “Turingian Man” began with two “manifestos”, the two Turing essays On Computable Numbers (1937) and Computing Machinery and Intelligence (1950).
“We are all liable to become Turing's men, if our work with the computer is intimate and prolonged and we come to think and speak in terms suggested by the machine. [...] Turing's man is the most complete integration of humanity and technology, of artificer and artifact, in the history of the Western cultures. "
In analogy to McLuhan, Bolter sees a shift in the preferred organ of knowledge. If the “Faustian man” had related himself to the world above through the eye, his descendant through the hand. The computer is a “gripping tool”, it “ manipulates” information and therefore promotes a tactile form of problem solving and “has much of the intimacy of the potter shaping his clay”. Closely related to this is another attitude that the computer introduces to the world: the game. Like the child in the sandpit, the Turingian mold and modify his ideas and as a programmer his code. Like the classic game, trying it out is of limited seriousness, since it is not irrevocable and a restart is always possible.
“[A] programmer can never forget that every solution in the computer world is temporary, makeshift, obsolescent. [...] he does not speak of 'destiny' but rather of 'options.' ”
Bolter draws the optimistic conclusion that "the computer age is less likely to produce a Hitler or even a Napoleon". Finally, like Coy after him, Bolter sees an awareness of the finiteness of the world as characteristic of the Turing galaxy. The Faustian man drove a politics, an economy, in general: a love of infinity, as it is manifested in God.
Wolfgang Coy then used the phrase Turing Galaxy for the first time in the spring of 1993 in a lecture at Interface II in Hamburg with the title The Turing Galaxy. Computers as media . His central thesis: "The Gutenberg galaxy of static print media merges into the Turing galaxy of dynamic programmable media." The text appeared together with two others in July 1994 under the title Computer als Medien. Three essays. This is the original trilogy of the Turing galaxy. Neither the person nor the innovation of Turing nor the name of the epoch are in the foreground. Rather, the main concern is to counter the popular notion of the computer as an automaton with the knowledge, which is not present in classical computer science, that the computer is a medium. The former consistently leads to artificial intelligence , while the medium of the computer organizes relationships between people.
Coupled with sensors and effectors to its immediate environment and networked globally through its intimate connection with communications technology, the Turing machine forms a media knowledge space analogous to that of the book. The computer is not just a medium, but as the “media-integrating machine per se”, it is the universal medium.
“All written, optical and electrical media can ultimately merge with microelectronics and computer technology to form a general digital medium. This means that every digital medium can be expanded to include the properties of the other digital media. "
The new medium is still thought of in Gutenbergian terms when Coy speaks of a “network of functionally extended typewriters with screens” , whereby text production is radically expanded to hypertext and hyper medium. Vannevar Bush , Doug Engelbart , Ted Nelson and Alan Kay are the names that stand for these lines of development towards the computer as an intelligence-enhancing knowledge machine.
Coy also formulates a political criticism of the computer when he describes the mainframe computers as “congealed control instruments of Taylorist and Fordist work systems” , “whose military origin is also recognizable from an organizational point of view.” To this he puts the “computer liberation” ( Ted Nelson ) through the Compared to the PC revolution, which brings "decentralized, interactively usable application programs to the desk" .
A year later, in his introduction to the German new edition of McLuhan's book Die Gutenberg-Galaxis , Coy connects the computer age closely to that of the book.
“A discontinuous break remains at the boundaries of the typographical: The writing itself can be seen as a 'digital', discontinuous arrangement. Inside the typographic grid, in its basic digital structure, the perspective of the Turing galaxy is already laid out. "
In the competition between books and computers, the book seemed to be the winner for the time being. But not much longer:
“The gradual replacement of the keyboard by mouse, stylus or voice input will help the digital-media society to shed the eggshells of their literal birth. With networking and media integration, the real power of computer science in media technology becomes visible. Like the printing press, it can change perception over a longer period of time - from a literal society to a global media society. Work and culture, politics, law, economy and almost all areas of society will not evade this process. [...] The replacement of the written culture by a computer culture has only just begun. The Gutenberg galaxy is expanding into the Turing galaxy. "
In 1996 Coy delivered further "components of the Turingian galaxy" in which fundamental processes of perception and with them "work and culture, politics, law, economics, science and almost all areas of society" are reconfigured. Again he emphasizes the importance of expanding media access from corporate to personal computing and now also the political dimension of the inherent globalization trend and the potential for abuse through violations of data protection.
This is also where the term “ knowledge system” by the Karlsruhe philosopher Helmut Spinner appears for the first time , which played a central role in Coy's further research on the Turing Galaxy.
The order of knowledge of the Turing galaxy
At the end of the 20th century, the legal order of the Turing galaxy came to the fore alongside the technical and media. In his declaration of independence for cyberspace in 1996, John Perry Barlow was able to declare the Internet to be a legal free area with good reason, but legal regulation began at the same time. This was particularly true of intellectual property rights. Also in 1996, the United Nations Agency for Intellectual Property (WIPO) passed two Internet agreements, the first copyright law specifically for the Turing Galaxy.
Already Ted Nelson had realized that hypertext do with the unity of the work and the allocation of this work to an author and his property problematic. In his view, this does not mean that copyright becomes superfluous, it must rather be designed with a higher resolution. The transclusion , i.e. the linking of parts of other works into a new work (as opposed to quoting), requires a transcopyright . He envisions a programmed knowledge environment in which the smallest parts of works down to words are marked with their owner, so that the payment of a composite work is automatically credited to all owners of the constituent parts. This vision can be read as a metastasis of intellectual property, but also as an anticipation of the dispute over sampling and remixing that began in the music industry and continues to this day.
At the end of the 1990s, the free software movement came into the limelight and with it a class of licenses that create a copyright space in which thousands of authors around the world can work together in open cooperation.
This means that Wolfgang Coy's research interests are now also directed towards what he describes as the system of knowledge using a term used by the Karlsruhe philosopher Helmut Spinner . The research projects From the order of knowledge to the order of knowledge of digital media (1998–2000, together with Jörg Pflüger and Volker Grassmuck ) as well as Image, Writing, Number in the Turing Galaxy (2004–2007, together with Volker Grassmuck) should be mentioned here , as well as the four Wizards of OS conferences .
On the one hand, these contributions revolve around the history of ideas of interactivity (Jörg Pflüger, Konversation, Manipulation, Delegation , 2004) and the guiding ideas of programming history (Jörg Pflüger, Writing, Building, Growing , 2004) from an IT perspective on the order of knowledge . On the other hand, from a legal-knowledge-sociological perspective, it is about the free knowledge cooperation, for which the American legal scholar Yochai Benkler coined the term commons -based peer production , as well as the opposing efforts of the copyright industry, with the help of DRM, the universal medium in a controlled rights player to transform (Volker Grassmuck, Free Knowledge. Between Private and Common Property , 2004).
Reception history
From the mid-1990s onwards, the media and cultural studies dealt with the computer revolved around the terms convergence, hypertext and hypermedia, interactivity and simulation. Based on the changes in the text, author and reader, the reception of the Turing galaxy concept is most pronounced in literary media theory. In addition, cultural scientists, sociologists, designers and historians also use the term.
The sociologist Volker Grassmuck went in his essay The Turing Galaxy. The universal medium on the way to world simulation (1995), based on the media genealogy Vilém Flussers :
“Each phase of the media is based on certain basic elements, the drawing material and its materiality, which in turn have characteristic operations, e.g. B. Forms of storage or linking, allow. In the course of this story, the operands are subject to dematerialization. If one follows Vilém Flusser's media genealogy, one finds universes of increasing abstraction and diminishing dimensionality: that of sculpture - the timeless body -, that of the images - the depthless surfaces - that of the texts - the flat lines - and that of the computation - the lineless points . "
Grassmuck traces this development from the four-dimensionality of the media system of nomadic people to the point universe of the Turing galaxy.
“In the Turing galaxy, in the universe of the integrating and informing universal machine, so the thesis, we are observing the reversal of the path described by Flusser today: from the zero-dimensionality of the bits, through one-dimensional texts and two-dimensional images, to staggered hypertex dreams, complex ones Networks and three-dimensional spaces, and finally to four-dimensional interaction spaces. "
Like Jay David Bolter, he adds the Turing test to the founding of the Turing galaxy from the Turing machine by Wolfgang Coy. In this experimental set-up, which was based on an imitation game by Turing himself in 1950 , a questioner enters into a conversation with a machine and a person via a teleprinter and is supposed to decide after a finite time which of the two is the machine. Turing assumes the possibility of an intelligent machine that does not allow such a decision. Man and machine would become indistinguishable.
In a phenomenology of the Turing galaxy, Grassmuck traces how, in the digital world, first the text, then the image media and the time-based media and finally the spatial dimension emerge anew. According to Grassmuck, the nature of the universal Turing machine is a space of possibility.
“In the Turing galaxy, to use the term Flusser, we stand at the zero point of dimensions, the world of points, which are 'immeasurable, nothing, and at the same time immeasurable, everything'. 'The universe of points is empty because it contains nothing but possibilities, and because it contains possibilities it is a full universe.' From this, Flusser derives the demand that we must learn to think, feel and act in the category of 'possibility'. "
Friedrich W. Block (* 1960) is a practitioner and theoretician of visual poetry. In his essay Auf high Seh in der Turing-Galaxis - Visuelle Poesie und Hypermedia (1997) he follows the experimental poet Oswald Wiener in that understanding of understanding has become the central problem of science and the arts and that the universal Turing -Machine represent the basic model. "In this sense, [the computer] as a medium and as a metaphor (etymologically, it is about mediation) at the center of current media art and its aesthetics." When studying the theories of electronic texts, however, he is amazed to find that these are constantly Reformulating positions of the modern avant-garde : “This applies not only to specifically literary texts, but also to all writing and reading of hyper and cyber texts. The basic aspects include: a. emphasizes the explication of spatiality and visuality, intermediality, the conception of an active reader as the second author and self-reflexivity in the use of hypertexts. "( Block 1997 )
Block examines the question of how computer media expand the previous spectrum of visual poetry. He notes that the few canonical examples of hypertexts, such as Michael Joyce's Afternoon, a story (1987), hardly come close to such a filigree multilinear syntax as in the often cited forerunner Finnegans Wake by James Joyce . Like Volker Grassmuck, he recognizes a truly new quality in the Turing Galaxy in the inclusion of the body. He sees first examples of this in the digital holopoetry by Eduardo Kac and in the “currently most famous media artwork ”, The Legible City (1989–1991) by Jeffrey Shaw and Dirk Groeneveld .
The cultural IT specialist Martin Warnke has also repeatedly dealt with Turing and the Turing galaxy in his work. In the essay The Medium in Turing's Machine (1997) he starts from the observation: “There must be more to Turing's machines than the calculator.” And he continues:
“He found the 'more' in his construction in his search for the thinking machine. The Turingian thought machine [...] is pushed between the domain of the calculable and the contingent environment of intelligent living organisms. "
What is meant is Turing's model of a child machine that gradually develops intelligence through interaction with teachers. According to Warnke, this expresses Turing's knowledge of intelligence as a social phenomenon as well as the “misery of AI ” , which relies on wanting to generate intelligence completely in the space of the predictable, i.e. in a Turing machine.
The knowledge that computer science did not achieve until the 1990s that the computer is a medium was already applied by Turing, "even if the word 'medium' does not appear anywhere in his writings." ( Warnke 1997 )
The Danish cultural scientist Niels Ole Finnemann begins his essay Hypertext and the Representational Capacities of the Binary Alphabet (1999) with the reference-free statement that “it is often said” that we are at the end of the Gutenberg galaxy and on the way to a new Turing -Galaxis would find electronic media based on non-sequential or multilinear hypertexts that give the user the freedom of choice to make the connections between parts of the text.
“In philosophical terms the transition is interpreted as a transition from modernity (print culture) to postmodernity (virtual cyber culture). If this scheme of opposition is not always explicitly stated nowadays, the reason is not - I assume - that the scheme has been given up, but rather that it is now a widely acknowledged precondition which is often taken for granted. ”
Finnemann makes it his business to explain that the Turing galaxy is not replacing the Gutenberg galaxy, but that its relationship is one of “co-evolution and integration”. He sees both as textual and therefore linear and serially processed representations manifested in an alphabet.
"There has never been any simple seriality and linearity in the universe of meaning and fiction not even if it is imprisoned in a linear alphabet and printed on paper in a book."
The real difference does not concern the text and its seriality, but the roles of author and reader:
“Basically, one could say that it is not the author, but the reader of a hypertext system, who is now responsible for the ordering of the sequences. [...] Contrary to the idea that the role of the author is diminished it is increased: in predicting the interest of users; in overviewing a variety of possible routes; and in developing solutions to the jumps between reading modes and browsing / navigating modes. "
In his essay From the “Gutenberg” to the “Turing Galaxy” (approx. 1997), the historian Uwe Dörk draws a link to Turing's test of 1950 (which concerned the question: “Can machines think?”) To the summer academy in Dartmouth 1956 on which John McCarthy formulated the "Artificial Intelligence" program. His conclusion: if science wants to remain science, i.e. not to become cyber-punk, it remains dependent on the gutenbergian access to knowledge:
"Thinking contemplation, analytical reflection and the transformation into long chains of reflection, which of course no longer have to be limited to pure textuality, remain [...] irreplaceable essentials."
In his essay Per Gutenberg durch die Turing-Galaxis (2006), the Austrian literary scholar Peter Plener (* 1968) traces the card box, this central mechanism of book-time knowledge management, from its wooden form to today's hard drives.
The media scientist Irmela Schneider asks herself, like Wolfgang Coy and Volker Grassmuck, the question of the copyright order of digital media. In the essay Concepts of authorship in the transition from the “Gutenberg” to the “Turing” galaxy (2006), she describes copyright law as a “sustainable stabilizer of the author concept, which is in crisis by the 19th century at the latest”. This crisis intensified in the dawning Turing galaxy through the potential decoupling of material artifacts and property and now affects not only literary but also journalistic and scientific authors. She closes with the question: “Who are the printers of the Turing galaxy? [...] a question of social discourse power. "
Today, as Finnemann attested in 1999, central concepts from the debate in the 1990s have become so natural that their terms are no longer used. Saying that Wikipedia is a hypertext or Second Life interactive has lost its explanatory value.
As an epochal term, the “ information society ” continues to dominate , a strictly speaking tautological term, since every social form that has made the transition from community to society is necessarily based on the media storage, transmission and processing of information.
In contrast, the much more substantial term of the epoch, the Turing galaxy, has two major advantages:
- he makes a specific connection of today's society to the Gutenberg galaxy , which does not replace the Turing galaxy, but transforms it into a fundamentally new formation within just one generation .
- he names the foundation of the knowledge system of digital media on the universal Turing machine , which cannot be surpassed in its elegant simplicity and comprehensive definition of predictability. The program of our age will remain to tap into the space of possibility that the universal Turing medium opens up.
criticism
The convention of naming epochs introduced by McLuhan tempts one to think of history as one of the great men (much less often women).
See also
- Media theory and media genealogy
- Loebner Prize : "The First Turing Test"
literature
- Friedrich W. Block: On high sight in the Turing galaxy - visual poetry and hypermedia. 1997
- Jay David Bolter : Turing's Man: Western Culture in the Computer Age. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1984, ISBN 0-8078-4108-0 (German edition: Der Digitale Faust . Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1990)
- Wolfgang Coy : Computers as Media. Three essays. Research report of the computer science course at the University of Bremen, July 1994, ISSN 0722-8996
- Bernhard Dotzler , Friedrich Kittler (ed.): Intelligence Service. Scriptures translated from the Engl. B. Dotzler. Brinkmann et al. Bose, Berlin 1987, ISBN 3-922660-22-3 .
- Niels Ole Finnemann: Hypertext and the Representational Capacities of the Binary Alphabet. (PDF file; 126 kB) 1999.
- Volker Grassmuck : Free Software. Between private and public property. (PDF file; 1.50 MB) Bonn 2004, ISBN 3-89331-569-1 .
- Stevan Harnad : Post-Gutenberg Galaxy: The Fourth Revolution in the Means of Production of Knowledge. 1991
- Harry Harrison , Marvin Minsky : The Turing Option. Roman, New York 1992, ISBN 0-446-36496-7 .
- Andrew Hodges : Alan Turing, Enigma. (Eng. Orig. 1983) Berlin 1989, ISBN 3-9801050-5-9 .
- Michael Joyce : afternoon: a story. 1987
- Andrea Knaut, Christian Kühne, Constanze Kurz, Jörg Pohle, Rainer Rehak, Stefan Ulrich (eds.), The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Turing Galaxy, Münster: MV-Verlag, 2012, ISBN 978-3-86991-697-2 .
- Helmut Spinner : The knowledge order. A guiding concept for the third basic order of the information age. Opladen 1994, ISBN 3-8100-1083-9 .
- Oswald Wiener , Manuel Bonik, Robert Hodicke: An elementary introduction to the theory of Turing machines. Vienna 1998, ISBN 3-211-82769-2 .
Essays
- Wolfgang Coy : From the Gutenberg galaxy to the Turing galaxy: Beyond book printing and television. Introduction to: Marshall McLuhan : The Gutenberg Galaxy. The end of the book age. Addison-Wesley, Cologne 1995
- Wolfgang Coy: Components of the Turing Galaxy. In: E. Bulmahn, K. van Haaren, D. Hensche, M. Kieper, H. Kubicek, R. Rilling, R. Schmiede (eds.): Information Society-Media-Democracy. Forum Wissenschaft series, BdWi-Verlag, Marburg 1996.
- Wolfgang Coy: Turing@galaxis.com II. In: Warnke, Coy, Tholen (Ed.): HyperKult - history, theory and context of digital media. Basel 1997, ISBN 3-86109-141-0 . Advance version online
- Michael Dlugosch: Between the Gutenberg and Turing galaxies. In: End of the paper - written culture at the end? Special issue Forum Media Ethics, No. 2, 1998.
- Wolfram Malte Fues: The Turing Galaxy. Hypertext and hyperfictional considerations. In: Gabriel Scherer / Beatrice Wehrli (ed.): Truth and Word. Festschrift for Rolf Tarot for his 65th birthday. Lang, Bern et al. 1996, pp. 137–152.
- Volker Grassmuck : The Turing Galaxy. The universal medium as a world simulation. In: Lettre International. German edition, Issue 28 (1st year 1995), pp. 48–55.
- Jörg Pflüger : Conversation, manipulation, delegation. On the history of ideas of interactivity. In: Hans Dieter Hellige (Hrsg.): Stories of Computer Science. Visions, paradigms, leitmotifs. Berlin 2004, pp. 367-408.
- Jörg Pflüger: Writing, Building, Growing: Guiding principles of programming history. In: Hans Dieter Hellige (Hrsg.): Stories of Computer Science. Visions, paradigms, leitmotifs. Berlin 2004, pp. 275-319.
- Peter Plener: Per Gutenberg through the Turing Galaxy. In: Kakanien revisited: Emergence. (Contributions from the "Emergences" workshops (2005/06)), October 30, 2006
- Irmela Schneider: Concepts of authorship in the transition from the “Gutenberg” to the “Turing” galaxy. (PDF; 108 kB). In: zeitblicke. 5, No. 3, 2006
- Peter Friedrich Stephan : Thinking on the model - design in the context of visual science. ( Memento from April 4, 2005 in the Internet Archive ) In: Bernhard E. Bürdek (Ed.): The digital madness. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main 2000
- Martin Warnke: The medium in Turing's machine. In: Martin Warnke, Wolfgang Coy, Georg Christoph Tholen (Eds.): HyperKult. Pp. 69–82, Stroemfeld / nexus, Basel 1997
- Martin Warnke: Turing media. In: Klaus Peter Dencker (Ed.): Interface 5 - The politics of the machine. Pp. 372–382, Hans-Bredow Institute, Hamburg 2002.
Web links
- Friedrich W. Block: On high sight in the Turing galaxy - Visual poetry and hypermedia , 1997
- Uwe Dörk: From the "Gutenberg" to the "Turing galaxy". The cultural consequences of evolution ( Memento of June 13, 2007 in the Internet Archive ). In: Multimedia and Perception of History. On the theory of multimedia knowledge processing, no year, AG Multimedia and History (since the summer semester 1997) of the Department of History at the University of Konstanz
Individual evidence
- ↑ On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Decision Problem (May 28, 1936)
- ↑ Manuel Castells: The information age . 2004, volume 1
- ^ Robert Lomas: The man who invented the twentieth century: Nikola Tesla, forgotten genius . London 1999.
- ↑ "[...] the computer age [...] is perhaps less likely to produce a Hitler or even a Napoleon."