What?

Last week, I was struck with ebola. Not really, but I was really sick and therefore missed out on all my classes all week. As a result of this misfortune, I was left to figure out last week's reading assignments on my own. Needless to say, I am less understanding of what is going on in these readings.
First, there are the chapters from N. Katherine Hayles' book Writing Machines. Her chapters made less than no sense to me. It seemed that she was trying to convey the computer as a human and how the changing focus of our society is directly effecting the changing development of the computer. Basically, for me, if the medium is the message, this message sucked. I had no idea what she was actually trying to get me to understand. I swear she was making up words. Her second chapter continues to become increasingly confusing to me when she began to describe Lexia to Perplexia and its outline. She states, "Communification arises when the circuit is completed, that is when humans and intelligent machines are interconnected in a network whose reach is reinforced by naming the few exceptions "detached" machines" (p. 56). Ok, what does this mean? Communification distracted me, in and of itself, because I just kept thinking about Homer Simpson mumbling "Saxamaphoooonnne" in an effort to play the saxophone. But I understand as far as humans and machines working together to form an exclusive network. We all do that, and that part wasn't as hard to decode for me.
Following the chapters by Hayles, there was a piece by Mark Taylor. This piece started out clear enough, fooling me into thinking that I would understand what I was about to read. My mind started to make connections involving statements such as "Taylor is far superior to Hayles because he says X in a way that she says ?". Needless to say, these statements didn't pan out. Because I wasn't in class, I missed how this tied into our discussion on the network and technology. The only connection I could make is simply that the way the Internet and other technological networks have been built is comprable to how great pieces of architecture have been built. I would be so clueless to believe that this whole piece was about architecture if it wasn't for the mention of chaos theory.
So here's my question to the class: Can you fill me in? What did I miss and did everyone else understand it also?