Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
In this passage, the substitution of a semantically congruent but syntac-
tically dissonant result parodies the syntactic process of calculation—a
curious and revealing inversion of modern experience with computer
operations on written text for information retrieval and spell checking.
In contrast to the syntactically generated result it implicitly replaces, the
semantic result does not generalize to other similar syntactic procedures.
In nineteenth century practice, the exosomatic technologies of writing
would have assisted human mental labor, and both semantic and syntac-
tic labor would have involved continuous human intervention. Following
the mechanization of mental labor during the late twentieth century, syn-
tactic labor could be transferred to information technology—operating
deterministically between intervals of human intervention and opening
up and revealing a distinction between semantic and syntactic mental
labor. Excepting processes already formalized or known to be formaliz-
able, attempts to transfer human mental labor to information technology
usually reveal the complexity and intractability of semantic labor.
The endorsement of strongly analogous distinctions—implicit in a
highly significant copyright judgment by the U.S. Supreme Court involv-
ing modern information technologies—supports the distinction between
semantic and syntactic labor and also between labor and process. In
Feist
v. Rural
, the court denied copyright protection to telephone white pages:
Nor can Rural claim originality in its coordination and arrangement of facts. The
white pages do nothing more than list Rural's subscribers in alphabetical order.
This arrangement may, technically speaking, owe its origin to Rural; no one dis-
putes that Rural undertook the task of alphabetizing the names itself. But there is
nothing remotely creative about arranging names alphabetically in a white pages
directory. It is an age-old practice, firmly rooted in tradition and so commonplace
that it has come to be expected as a matter of course. . . . It is not only unoriginal,
it is practically inevitable. (Feist 1991, 363)
Age-old practice corresponds to syntactic labor and the alphabetization
of names corresponds to a syntactic process, delegated to the forms of
information technology current in the 1980s. Slightly obscured within the
Court's judgment—and not fully brought into contrast with its explicit
reversal of the labor theory of copyright—is a reference to “writings
which are to be protected . . . [as]
the fruits of intellectual labor
, embodied
in the form of books, prints, engravings, and the like” (1991, 346). The
intellectual labor embodied in the protected writings is closely analogous
