In this article, the author analyzes the computer as a change agent, and explores the effects of the computers in communication.

Although computers are quite new in our lives, they already "revolutionized the way in which people think about information, education, business, and even interaction with each other", also generated new phrases such as "input", "core dump (sharing all of one's knowledge on a topic with someone else)".

With the advent of new technologies, new terms and phrases are generated. Notion of distance and time changed with the news way of transportation and communication. "With the rise of calculators, everyone became a whiz at basic mathematics; with the coming of word processors, everyone became a perfect typist."  

The Semiotics of Computing entails examining the communicative variables in terms of which storage and retrieval of meaning takes place. These variables are the same ones familiar from linguistic and semiotic models.

General model of human communication:

	Content: (signifie)	Modality:	Shape: (significant)	Participants:
	Reality Experience Ideas	Visual Auditory (tactile), (olfactory), (taste)	e.g., pictures, colors, graphemes, movies, sounds, words.	Producer (e.g., speaker, writer, director) Receiver (e.g., hearer, readers, movie audience) Society (e.g., social structure, extent to which producer and receiver interact)
	"stuff " that is being referred to.	Means by which information is transmitted. (e. g., language is auditory and visual.)	Carrying case of language	Actors who engage in meaningful exchange.

Perspectives on Computing  

 

	Content: (signifie)	Modality:	Shape: (significant)	Participants:
The three Computer Revolutions
Late 1950s through Mid-1970s.	Refers to the problem to be solved. A calculation, a simulation, a text to write and edit, data retrieve.		Transformed into many forms. Carried trough visual channel (0s and 1s, to many computer languages)	Single human being to machine.
Early 1980s.		Visual, graphic
		Computers as graphic media: as sources of visual images the visual medium as a channel for communicating with the machine
Late 1980s though 2000		Auditory		Interacting with the computer
2000 to present		Smell chips		Communicating with the world

Writing on-line

Tactile editing by electronic devices (by dragging and dropping symbols from here to there). Manual editing involves physically manipulating or altering by using a real pen and a scissors. In the new world of text processing, the tasks of copy editing and layout have been collapsed. Usually authors carried away with new computer features, judging from evidence so far, the proliferation of word processing will generate prettier but poor written prose.

Reading on-line  

Readers tend to view literary texts analytically rather than holistically. Text will be seen as sources of information to be deconstructed rather than as models of human experience to be transmitted from one generation to the next. Reading will be replaced by text searches and literary criticism.

Responding to Change: Since the computers are created by humans, we have the power to be active commentators upon the evolving semiotics of computing.