echoes in the network
I mused recently:
If you send an e-mail
and there’s no answer
and you send another e-mail
and there’s still no answerdid your e-mails make a sound?
Talan responded to the effect of: data makes language-like noise which is interpretable by the machine.
“In that regard, it is not the message that is silent, not producing a sound, but the human agent, the correpondent at the other end of the line. […] [I]t would seem… the riddle is more about the echo the message produces.”
The message produces an echo, but we don’t know where it is. We can’t hear it, cannot physically access the network “space”. Sometimes we request receipt, an electronic bounce that tells us the intended recipient (or hacker) has opened our e-mail, if not actually read it. But, unless the hands on the other side of this cup-and-string phone type OK, we don’t get receipt. So it’s not an echo. The only echo is the transmission.
Songs about Roland were transmitted first by the jongleurs, traveling minstrels. If we follow the above logic, then the results of this transmission – the comic-epic poems of the Italian Renaissance, the Sicilian puppet theatre, the recreation of Roland as fanatical religious martyr in Germany and as Civil War Hero in the U.S. – do not matter. What matters is the transmission itself, and possibly the vehicles of the transmission.
I’m most interested in the echo aspect. Echo is not the exact repetition of a sound; it is the original sound, modified. The precise way in which it is modified is directly dependent on immediate surroundings. The precise ways in which Roland is modified are a direct result of the cultural exigencies of the time. So, changes in cultures across geographical and temporal space may be inferred from a close look at the mutations Roland’s character and his stories continue to undergo.
