Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
A distinction then could be made between semantic and syntactic mental
labor for both premodernity and modernity. Semantic mental labor cor-
responded to the work involved in conducting transformations on signs
motivated by their meaning, and syntactic labor corresponded to trans-
formations reduced to motivation from patterns. Semantic mental labor
was irreducibly and directly human.
Semantic labor
➞
human labor.
Expressing the relation between semantic labor and human labor as mate-
rial implication allows for the possibility that human labor is more exten-
sive than semantic labor, incorporating syntactic aspects.
2
In contrast to
semantic labor, syntactic labor could be transferred to technology, and
labor would become process.
Syntactic labor
can be transferred to
information technology (labor
becomes process).
A technological process was
a priori
syntactic in character, operating on
patterns and not directly on meaning. In premodern historical practice,
syntactic labor was delegated to human clerical labor; under modern
conditions, it is increasingly transferred to information technology as a
machine process.
Transformations of Selection Labor
Selection power remained a relatively stable primitive or atomic fact as
a quality of human consciousness; selection labor, although persistently
present, modulated with historical transformations in information tech-
nology. In developing the proposition that selection power is produced
by selection labor, we focused primarily on transformations of selection
labor as a form of mental labor understood by the distinctions established
within labor and mental labor.
When orality emerged into literacy, description labor in information
systems included the cognitive labor of memory and recall as well as the
bodily and communicative labor of public oral expression. Embodied in a
socially designated individual, the Icelandic law-speaker exemplifies such
an information system (Njal 1280/1960, 306-308). In oral speech, the
process of production and the product (audible speech) disappeared with
the process, leaving no trace outside the memory of the auditors; process
