Fall 2025 Colloquium Series

Drawing from the chapter 8 of her book, this presentation critiques the constructed images of Taiwanese companies as invaders and counterfeiters, portrayed by the US media and congressional hearings participants in the late summer of 1983. The misrepresentations indicate that the US computer industry, media, and analysts failed to make sense of founder of Acer Computer Stan Shih’s success in the microcomputer market; they believed that the only way Taiwanese computer makers could succeed was by counterfeiting. However, the influence of Stan Shih and his fellow Taiwanese computer manufacturers, such as MiTAC, was growing. They became sought-after subcontractors for prestigious tech corporations around the world in the second half of the 1980s. In 2006, Intel’s CEO, Paul S. Otellini, highlighted Stan Shih’s contributions, stating that he is “a big reason why your PC costs $1,000, not $10,000” in a Time magazine article titled “Asian Heroes: Stan Shih.”

Boyle sought to link macro-level phenomena, encountered in everyday empirical reality, with the domain of unobservable micro-particles in motion, on the one hand, and the barely graspable cosmological realm, on the other. “Imaginary” in this sense is not synonymous with or reducible to “speculative,” although the categories overlap in interesting ways. In the 1670s, Boyle proclaimed that “the World being but, as it were, a great piece of Clock-work, the Naturalist as such, is but a Mechanician; however the parts of the Engine … be some of them much larger, and others much minuter, than those of Clocks or Watches.” Seductively clear, the universe-as-clockwork metaphor has since commanded most attention, but it is Boyle’s reference to the engine and its parts that reveals important aspects of his natural philosophy. Boyle utilized “engine” as a pliable trope encompassing inanimate and animate entities and their interrelations at the micro, macro, and cosmological levels. 

Fluids, I argue, were a crucial link in this metaphysical and epistemological chain. Cosmologically ubiquitous fluids like water, air, and fire sustained the world like humors and spirits animated living bodies. Boyle’s view of fluidity and fluids as “intermediate causes,” located between observable phenomena and universal mechanistic principles, carved out a space for fertile analogical reasoning that challenged received standards of scientific intelligibility and distinctions between mechanisms and organisms. Informed and constrained by human experience, imagination, and language, Boyle’s conflicted yet inventive efforts redefined the interplay between matter theory and experimental practice, natural philosophy and natural history, tradition and innovation. 
 

The first involves computerized conferencing: an early networking technology through which researchers considered some of the first questions of online social participation. Notably, researchers employed people with disabilities as research subjects, with the understanding that this technology might one day enable greater social participation without needing to move about the built environment. It would be a digital space where all were equal, as text on the screen, with aspects of bodily identity hidden from view.

The second case concerns the Sony Magic Link, a portable tablet-like computer of the mid-1990s that employed a highly metaphorical graphical interface where users wrote postcards to each other and traveled through digital spaces in order to perform activities like going online. In this example, the user’s body becomes both metaphor and physical, moving through a digital world while the user carries the device with them through the real world. 

In both cases, bodies are the site where the material world intersects with digital space. Bodies embrace technology and welcome digitization, in certain ways, while pushing back and resisting it in others. It is through the body that digital interaction becomes possible, and therefore the promise of greater access to social participation becomes real, but in ways where the body can become obscure and immaterial.