My Inner Nerd Shines Through...with a Buffy Reference

While watching an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (season 1, episode 8 to be exact) entitled "I, Robot...You, Jane", a particular scene caught my eye. I have searched for a way to play it here but I have settled on giving you a section of the transcript instead. To set it up a little, the episode follows the story of Buffy and her friends as they try to destroy a demon who has taken over their school's computers. Buffy's normal sage, Giles, is out of his element as he is by trade a librarian. He enlists the help of the school's computer science teacher Ms. Calendar (a self proclaimed techno-pagan - hah!). The following dialogue occurs between Giles and Ms. Calendar in the last five minutes of the episode, after all returns to right with the world for the conclusion of the episode.

[Cut to the school the next day. Cut to the computer lab. Ms. Calendar is standing at her desk and typing on her PC. Giles comes in, clears his throat and knocks on the open door. She turns to see who's there.]

Ms. Calendar:  (smiles) Well, look who's here! Welcome to my world. (with a bit of an attitude) You scared?

Giles:  I'm remaining calm, thank you. Uh, I just wanted to, uh, return this. (holds up a small curly earring) I found it among the new books, and naturally I thought of you.

Ms. Calendar:  Cool. Thanks. (takes it)

Giles:  Uh, well, I'll, I'll see you anon. (begins to go)

Ms. Calendar:  Can't get outta here fast enough, can you?

Giles:  (comes back in) Truthfully, I'm even less anxious to be around computers than I used to be.

Ms. Calendar:  Well, it was your book that started all the trouble, not a computer.

Giles is at a loss.

Ms. Calendar:  Honestly, what is it about them that bothers you so much?

Giles:  The smell.

Ms. Calendar:  Computer's don't smell, Rupert.

Giles:  I know! Smell is the most powerful trigger to the memory there is. A certain flower or a, a whiff of smoke can bring up experiences...long forgotten. Books smell. Musty and, and, and, and rich. The knowledge gained from a computer, is, uh, it... it has no, no texture, no, no context. It's, it's there and then it's gone. If it's to last, then, then the getting of knowledge should be, uh, tangible, it should be, um... smelly.

Ms. Calendar:  Well! You really are an old-fashioned boy, aren't you?

The highlighted portion is what made me sit up and take notice. It took me back to the first Barry Brummet article, Some Implication of 'Process' or 'Intersubjectivity'. In the first section of the article, Brummet discusses the mechanistic world view where "what at a moment appeared to be soul, ideas, or will would in time be found to be material" (p. 22). Giles seems to have a fairly mechanistic view of the world. All knowledge can be contained in books and transmitted that way. There is something lacking in cyberspace for him. (I'm going to make the jump here from (when Giles says) "computer" to "internet".)

The context of everything on the internet changes from computer to computer, browser to browser. When coding webpages in HTML you must account for these differences. You pick a font for your information to be displayed in, however not all browsers or computers may support that font. You add in secondary and tertiary fonts in case the one you picked is not supported. On top of that, in browsers like Google Chrome you can also specify a "theme" where it will color scheme-ify all your tabs and backgrounds. Information gained from a computer has many contexts, none of them specified by the author/information giver.

With a book, the author can put in any necessary frills or embellishments and in general, can control what the final product will look like. Or at the very least, all books look similar. Similar typefaces and similar materials make all books look the same. There is nothing that the author didn't write inside the book. There are no outside sources influencing your reading at the same time as you are reading the original text. With the internet, you could be reading the same text and looking at a critique of the text or the author in the next tab or window (not to mention your own personal context that is now framing your reading). It completely changes the way you are reading the original text.