Neil's E-learning and Digital Cultures Blog

I haven’t really found my “blog voice” yet and I’m acutely aware that this is a public forum.  However, today saw me witness the broad cultural appeal of “Little Britain’s” recalcitrant computer smash into my personal reality prompting flashes of images from the Film Festival to pop up as it was all happening. So I’m going to try and write about it!

Up until now, I’ve treated the films we’ve been watching as academic exercises. What are they trying to tell us? In “Word Builder”, why does the husband/designer create a yellow flower? Will the villagers in “Bendito” move on to a 4G deity now that they Deus Dial Up Modem proved a bust? In all of this, I have found emotion to be lacking. And I think that is dangerous when we consider culture in any form. Culture both provokes and sustains emotion. Deep, rock-rooted and intensely personal emotion. Just as I found myself muttering in Scots when the LifeStream was defying me, I believe that most people have a personal relationship with their culture, the depth of which may surprise them when it is revealed in moments of stress or liquefaction!

What's my default?

I left Scotland nearly 20 years ago with no plan in my head other than to see other cultures, learn new things and eat different food. As time has gone on, my overt cultural links to my place of birth have in some instances ossified: prices in Edinburgh shock me as my mind still expects to pay for things circa 1991; I expect the villages of my youth not to have turned into suburbs and I still think of the Grassmarket as exciting but scary. Other things have kept up with the times; banks! As an expatriate worker who has already had to leave one country rather sharpish on account of local instability, I know it is sensible to keep a bank account alive and kicking back in the Home Place. While relatives and friends are happy to take you in for “a wee while”, nobody wants to keep you indefinitely. So, I have an Emergency Bank Account. I have trained myself not to think of it as money for spending and, being an internet account, that’s been easy. Maybe it has something to do with the colour of the screen when I access the account, but I imagine it as a small room buried under a hill (a faulty holodeck, perhaps?) Of course, access to this buried treasure does not involve spades, shovels and troll-blinding spells but the process of entering User ID, Password, and selected items from my Memorable Information.

It's all mine. Mine!

I don’t check this account often but pop in every few months to see if the pirates have been. Forever exhorted not to write security details down, I haven’t. So, I was relying on memory and a cryptic note I’d written to myself about 2 years ago which now made no sense post summer holidays and the start of the LifeStream. Naturally, it all went wrong but my screen, determined to be helpful, started suggesting how I could rectify the situation. I was guided to a new page, entered the few details I could remember and was given a reference number and phone number to call in the UK. I called and was guided by an automated message. Then the message told me it was having difficulty recognising some of my details and was transferring me. Bips and beeps and staccato tones followed. Eventually a human came on the line. We worked through the process of identifying myself. Up till now I had been fully focussed on gaining access to my account. This was the moment when Digital Culture became evident.

How do you prove you are really you? Are the questions chosen by the system and merely relayed by the humans the right ones? 20 or so years on, does anyone really remember the month and year when they opened the account? I can remember the snooty clerk who dealt with my application. Isn’t that just as valid?

On the one hand, the call centre staff were Scottish and the cadences of their accents calmed me into thinking this would be a straightforward, matter-of-fact transaction. Starved of visual or physical cues, I was relying solely on the transmission and receipt of oral/aural code to make this work. But the system does not recognise a shared culture. The system needs to be fed exact facts. On demand and as required. I got one of my security questions mixed up. I realised this when I was on to my 3rd question and I corrected the previous mistake but it was too late. The system had already received my incorrect submission. My culture-sharer on the other end of the line sympathised profusely and perhaps we even bonded. But the system is implacable. No surprise I started channeling Hal at this point. Sympathy but no wavering in stance.

I was now beyond the help of my first human and was redirected to a second. He also sympathised but reiterated that the system had now moved on and had already started the process of locking my account until an entirely new protocol had been initiated and satisfied. I saw the machines from “Bendito”. Obey or be destroyed. It may sound funny but it wasn’t. I stood at my bedroom window, phone pressed to my ear, gazing out at the washing flapping in the still-too-hot air and felt fear. The money in that account is supposed to pay for this course. The money in that account is now locked behind a door I can’t open. The humans can’t help me open that door. The system has locked the door. I heard the Voice of Colossus.

The process has been initiated

In its wisdom, the system (I have deliberately not used a capital S for fear of scaring myself further) has sent out an automated letter to my Scottish address even though it normally sends things to me here. Why? This is a security matter. The system defaults to…. something I didn’t understand. Once the letter is received, in reassuring paper and ink, the information in the letter must be inputted back into the system. Then, and only then, will the system open the door. Couldn’t the system send a letter to me here? No. Couldn’t the system send some sort of encrypted electronic message? No. The system has decided and will do nothing more till it is fed whatever it wants to be fed.

I may sound glib in this posting. But this incident highlighted for me the emotive side of dealing with machines and internet based systems. As we’re looking at the human element, I thought this was surprisingly apt. Throughout the events described above, the humans were kind, helpful, understanding but ultimately unable to do anything. It was clear, at times, that though they follow certain protocols, they were not sure exactly why and relied on referring back to the system as a default position.

It is also clear that fear is present. From the fear of identity theft, to theft of possessions, to getting things wrong, to doing something that the system doesn’t like and instigates punishment.

I entrusted material possessions in the form of money to a virtual location. That money took on a virtual presence but has a physical significance: it’s my survival money. So, that means for me that this money is imbued with all manner of emotions as I already know what it feels like to leave a country with no more than 2 bags and a suntan. As a result of bungling the unlocking of the padlocks, that money was being withheld from me. The second human told me how much virtual cash I still had (phew, no pirates!) which almost made it worse in as much as I caught a glimpse of my security blanket through the bars but could go no further.

A range of emotions ensued; frustration with both myself for forgetting so many bits of information and at the system for not knowing I was who I said I was; disappointment at not getting things sorted; anxiety because the phone calls took almost an hour and I was paying peak international rates; fear because I thought I might “lose” my money; annoyance that I could only stare at the screen and not be able to interact with it (look, I might say, here’s my passport and here’s my driving licence and here’s my birth certificate, now let me in); embarrassment that I was in this situation (those humans must be thinking what a fool, he’s lost all that important information and now he wonders why he can’t get in) but, overall, helplessness as there was absolutely nothing I could do, no-one to whom I could appeal, no quick fix.

This experience has prompted me to go back and view again the films in the festival but this time with the intention of seeing the emotion in them. I have always had an emotional reaction to Hal but I’d viewed some of the other clips as something abstract and disconnected. In fact, “Word Builder” initially made me think of clever advertising but no more than that as I found the denouement both contrived and mawkish. Re “Poetic Holodeck”, I’ve spent the last decade or more living next to deserts so I find the whole idea of snow-capped mountains representing nature to be no more than an echo of 18th century Europe’s obsession with the sublime. The only films that had emotionally touched me were the scenes from “2001″, “The Matrix” and “Massive Attack”, the latter because of the voice more than the visuals. But I hadn’t bothered to really work out why.

In conclusion, it is still not easy to say why. “eXistenZ” may disgust us and “Colossus” may frighten us but I realised today that this course is about reaching in deep and applying what I’m studying to what I’m experiencing. I guess that is what the LifeStream is all about. I can’t simply read some articles, watch some clips and play around on YouTube. The fact is that our emotional reaction to what we experience, what we live through online is as vivid, pertinent and consciousness-forming as anything we experience in real life. Maybe it’s because emotions are ephemeral but also transferable that this happens. I can sit at my screen for 12 hours but I will never really feel I’m inside the machine in front of me. But my emotional involvement with the “Neil” that exists in the virtual world is real and significant. Part of me, as I discovered today, the part of me that means something to who I am, exists inside (I still see that world as inside something else). The physical me has to know how to trigger the right responses and reactions to responses to access that part of me. I can’t reboot and start again as I will risk losing the Neil that has already been created and already means something. Today taught me that my virtual self is real and plays or abides by rules, laws, systems that are not open to typical human reactions. If my e-pass doesn’t work on the bus, the chances are that the bus driver will let me stay on. He and I both know that the system sometimes hiccups and we can be human together, shrug and let it go. But when human and machine interact, we still don’t know each other well enough to get inside each others’ thought processes to make it happen.

Today the machines won. It’s difficult not to see it as a contest. If I ever want to see my money again, I need to do what the system wants. Maybe that’s why the films show fear of the machines; their lack of compromise and of the irrational yet entirely understandable human ability to just let things go. We rely on mutually sustainable compassion much more than we think.