Kevin's E-learning and Digital Cultures Blog

When I originally posted this video, it was without any commentary, and I let the post title speak for itself.  At the time I thought it an interesting piece of tech which tied loosely to the course because we had looked at H.A.L. through the film festival.  Reading back through my posts now, and re-watching the clip, I felt it needed further commentary.

Was I intrigued by the tech because it would add some new unique functionality to my life? I don’t actually own an iPhone, so the fact that this was an Iris 9000 Voice Control Module for Siri (iPhone’s voice activated personal assistant), was not the compelling feature.  I have voice command controls and text to speech functionality on my BlackBerry already, and it’s not a feature that I use, so that wasn’t it either.

Perhaps it was to have a conversation piece for display… something from popular culture that not everyone would understand, but would be kitschy to have.  I think this is the most likely case… but then it got me thinking about another reason why this might be desirable.

We tend to have the need to humanize our things.  We give them faces, human voices, visual cues to interact with, so that we can relate more readily to them.  Pressing the button on the front of the phone and speaking to an ethereal voice somehow seems more natural if the voice is represented by a familiar physical object (with a glowing red light).  Giving it a recognizable persona somehow makes it seem more real.

I tossed around ideas for my visual artifact for most of the week.  I went from playing with PowerPoint, and Xtranormal, to doing a photo mash-up.  The technology wasn’t the issue, but the focus of the artifact was.  I couldn’t decide what to do.  I got hung up on the idea of a haunted classroom, and students as ghosts, but I couldn’t work out how to create the visual for it.  Should I try to take images of students and make them look ghostly, or should I find students with blank stares and leave it to the viewer to infer.  How literal should I be?

I decided to re-read my blog postings, and search for inspiration.  I kept coming back to the questions I asked in my Week 2 Summary:  “Why is it a recurring theme in science fiction that android’s want to be more human, or the perfect human?”  I decided to do a play on that, and I Googled (is that a word now? If so, it hasn’t made it into the spell check yet) androids and variations of the theme of wanting to be human, and came up with lots of possibilities.

I wish I could remember which combination of parameters in a Google search originally led me to the following image…

It was easy enough to find again for this post using Wizard of Oz as the keywords and searching through images, but I remember finding it while searching android as a keyword.  Serves me right for not taking better notes.

In any case, it was this image that my twisted brain turned into a relationship between androids and wanting to find fulfillment, and completion in their search for humanness, and the Wizard of Oz.  It just seemed fitting to replace the characters on the yellow brick road with some familiar robots.

There were a lot to choose from, but I discounted the Robin Williams character in Bicentennial Man, the Sonny character in i, Robot, and the various Blade Runner characters.  I tried somehow to bring in Darth Vader, but then wondered how I would differentiate between cyborgs and androids, so I decided against using him.

In the end, I chose the child robot from A.I., David, who would represent the Dorothy character, with the little robot dog as TOTO.  (I honestly didn’t think much about the dog at the time,  I just wanted a little dog, and I wanted it to be mechanical.  Looking back now, if an android were to have pet, would it choose a robot dog?)  I chose the David character because like Dorothy who sought to return to the love of her family and friends, he just wanted to be loved.

DATA I envisioned as the Scarecrow since the Scarecrow seeks a brain, but is already unknowingly the “wisest man in Oz.”  DATA seeks to become human, but as is inferred in many episodes, is perhaps the most human of them all.

Johnny 5 is the most robotic looking character I chose, and I used him to represent the Tin Man.  Johnny 5 gains sentience through an accident and spends the film learning about life and shying away from his destructive military programming.  I felt it was an interesting correlation to gaining respect for life and finding a heart.

Finally, Marvin from the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy seemed perfect as the Cowardly Lion.  Both characters are so over the top and dramatic that they just seemed to fit.

I found the images through Google and used Microsoft Paint and Word to bring them together.  I suppose that I could have used Photoshop to make it more polished, but the result I achieved through Word suited my needs, so I went with it.

I loved reading the comments, and I think in many ways my view of the piece that I created has now changed after reading the viewpoints of others.  I can see what they see, and am surprised by what others have found or inferred that was beyond my original intent.  It makes me wonder how I am perceiving other people’s works, and how my perception differs from the intent of the author.  Do any of us ever really see the original author’s point, when we look at things with our own life goggles…

After reading the comments I thought it appropriate to provide a closer view of the elements I chose for my artifact:

Johnny 5	A.I.	DATA	Marvin

A fairly quiet week for me due to personal obligations, but I was able to attend the Skype chat…  glad I made it since there were some interesting discussions.

Bayne: Reflecting upon the readings for this week, I tweeted about the idea of students as ghosts in a haunted classroom…  I was reading the Bayne article while proctoring an exam, and observing the students, and the line “the ontological blurring of being and not-being, presence and absence online…” inspired my tweet.  I saw the students attending a traditional class, but at the same time not being 100% present in that they were participating in other worlds through their BlackBerrys, or surreptitiously through the web while they thought I wasn’t looking.

How much presence constitutes attendance to the class?  Does the physical body just need to be in a seat, or is mental presence necessary as well?  Can any of us say that we are truly fully present in anything we do… especially when so many things are calling for our attention?

I would argue that a new vision of a university must harness the idea of ghostliness, and challenge students in new ways to retain their presence in the learning process.  The online/distance model forces students to engage more actively in the class in order to be credited for their work.  The work can be done at any time, anywhere, but it must be done.  The old traditional method gives them freedom to be distracted.  I wonder if it would be possible to successfully blend the two in my classroom, or would it cause chaos?

Kress: I found it hard to read the Kress article without thinking of the medium and message debate again.  Should we concentrate more on the medium (text, pictures) or the message that is being transmitted?  Is how we interpret the message impacted by the medium we choose to share it with?  Is the progression from text to pictures not more to do with our culture than the positives or ‘gains and losses’ of one form vs the other?  As Kress asks “Would the next generation of children actually be much more attuned to truth through the specificity of depiction rather than the vagueness of word? “

“One felt as if there was an enormous well behind them, filled up with ages of memory and long, slow, steady thinking; but their surface was sparkling with the present: like sun shimmering on the outer leaves of a vast tree, or on the ripples of a very deep lake. I don’t know but it felt as if something that grew in the ground — asleep, you might say, or just feeling itself as something between root-tip and leaf-tip, between deep earth and sky had suddenly waked up, and was considering you with the same slow care that it had given to its own inside affairs for endless years.”

—The description of Treebeard in The Two Towers Volume III – Treebeard^[4] Wikipedia

But which description do you prefer, or is more beneficial to your understanding; the Tolkien words or the Peter Jackson image?  I argue that as Kress states… “words are empty entities to be filled with meaning.”  The image is Jackson’s interpretation of Tolkien’s words, and his image shapes our understanding of the character.  Can we watch the film and imagine Treebeard as looking any different?  We are locked into the imagery, but in reading,  the character can be anything we want…

Thomas: In reading the Thomas article, and the “questions about the impact of computers on literacy (and upon the literary). Is the Internet really changing the ways in which we read, write, and think? Is the book truly dead?“  My first thought was of Amazon.com, and the millions of books they sell…  But then, their e-reader is extremely popular, so is the technology outnumbering the printed book in sales?  It does appear to be so, thus perhaps the printed book will soon be dead…. or perhaps it is that the printed material is just the medium, and the work itself is not dependent on it…  do we need therefore to redefine what the book itself is?

If we are moving into a transliterate world, and we have the technology to broadcast ourselves to the world, does this mean that true literacy will suffer?  Or is it a new frontier, with projects such as A Million Penguins leading the way?  Despite the tendency of our culture towards digital narcissism, surely there are still some quality pieces being created.

As the Thomas article quotes Microsoft National Technology Officer Jerry Fishenden: “The move to the digital era could be as democratizing as the birth of the printing press was in the fifteenth century. It will bring the ability to capture and share human experiences, learning and entertainment in far more intuitive ways than the age of literacy allowed.”  We have reached an age where anyone with a computer can be a published author, information is shared globally in an instant, and you too can be the star of your own world…

Other worlds… a great theme, and one which recurs in many of my favorite science fiction stories.  Taken literally, it could simply be the idea of a world different from our own… another planet, another galaxy, another time, another dimension.  But I feel it can also be about the choices we make… the red or blue pill? Each choice sets you on a new path…  but which is the right path?  What is truth?  How do we know?

Daniel makes a very interesting point in her blog that I agree with: “we can actually make the astonishing claim that there is no such thing as one absolute definition of reality.“  We can look at a film like the Poetic Holodeck and argue about various interpretations, but what is to say which is the right interpretation?  If the holodeck is sentient and chooses to create a mountain for itself, then why are we questioning its choice?  As far as we are aware, maybe that is the holodeck’s definition of reality.

In World Builder the man creates a world, and rushes to make every detail perfect in anticipation of the arrival of the woman.  But then he hides from her and watches her enjoy his creation.  At the end we find that she is in a coma like state, and in the “neuro holographic recovery unit.”  So an interpretation might be that he is trying to help her recover be recreating a favorite memory… but if we each have our own definitions of reality, his recreation of the memory can’t possibly be the same as hers.  So certainly she would be aware that his creation was not real, wouldn’t she?

If we have no “absolute definition of reality” then how can we hope to share our experiences and life with anyone, when everyone is experiencing their own world?  Perhaps Other Worlds then is not so far reaching as some far off magical land, but simply how the person next to you is experiencing this same existence… and it is as other worldly and foreign to you as science fiction.  But isn’t that what it is to be human?  To strive to understand the different reality, and to be more alike, to find similarities, to share?

I always find it interesting that we use stories involving androids and aliens to try and define what it means to be human.  It’s almost as if we cannot look at ourselves, and need to have an other worldy being see us, and to see through his/her/it’s eyes to find clarity.  Are we the collection of our experiences and when we die, we are lost like tears in the rain?

Or are we something more?  What makes us human, as opposed to meat sacks making noise with our meat flaps?

Is it our individuality, or the sum of our collection of choices that make us human?

Or is it that we have the ability to ask these questions… to wonder about our existence… to try and find connections and similarities with others, but still want to be separate and unique?  Why is it a recurring theme in science fiction that android’s want to be more human, or the perfect human?  Isn’t that just our projecting ourselves onto the android, so that we can relate?  Why wouldn’t the android want to be the perfect android?  I for one can’t wait until a day when I might be able to ask.

This is my first post in the E-learning and Digital Cultures 2011 course at the University of Edinburgh.

I’m simply playing for now, and will begin posting in earnest once I’ve set up my lifestream.