For some reason, certain feeds stopped working on my LifeStream, namely YouTube and Delicious.  This meant I had to tinker with the settings.  This induced fear; fear of breaking something and not being able to get back my “stuff”.  After it was all sorted and the feeds were flowing again, I reflected on this aspect of my interaction with my digital life and the anxiety that arises from suspecting that going into settings will break your connection with your virtual presence.  (After all, so many warnings flash up asking if you’re really sure that you want to do that.  Of course I’m not.  I just want it to work.)

How much of this affects our digital culture?  I suspect that many people get into comfortable ruts online just as they do in the real world.  It’s an overused phrase these days, but “early adopters” remain few in number and most of us (well, me) react to online elements that have been suggested to us (or me).  And we want things to work.  I want my interaction with my online presence to be seamless and flowing.  However, this is not always the case.  I’ve spent 2 days trying to download software in college that would be great for my final assignment.  But it’s incompatible with my newly issued laptop.  This is where the frustration comes in and we find that we need our culture to support us.  In our real world culture, if something upsets me I can phone a friend or go for a walk.  When the whirly wheel on the download report sticks in the virtual mud and refuses to whirl again, what do I do?

"Like a spiral within a spiral, like a wheel within a wheel, ever turning, every spinning..."

I think that this is why the ethnography assignment has been so interesting.  I’ve been observing an online group that provides support to teachers.  Now I’m conscious of how solitary my online presence has been as I tend to  reinvent the wheel rather than ask for help.

And that fear?  I’ll be forever haunted by the scene from “The IT Crowd” where Jen brings “the internet” to the shareholders’ meeting and then “breaks it”.  Laugh though I will, part of me, deep down inside, thinks that this may actually be possible.

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I’ve been doing some maintenance work on my LifeStream prompted by the realisation that both the YouTube and Delicious feeds had stopped working, thereby making a mockery of my last summary!  While in the dashboard, tinkering tentatively with links, I noticed my spam comments.  Among other things, I have been invited to join several special cruises, design my own jewellery and contact someone called Mandy who has very kindly offered to increase my Google ranking; apparently I’m not getting the attention I deserve.

Which made me think about membership and belonging and how to carry out this latest assignment.  I don’t for one minute believe that Mandy is even real or that the people running the cruises are so heart-set on my joining them but, just for a split second, there was a flash of belonging.  I love the sea and I love being on the sea.  The message was chatty, friendly and almost human. 

Cunard's Queen Victoria arrives in Cochin, India.

There is a basic human desire to belong to groups.  However, as the readings highlight, the criticism from social constructivists of the holistic approach focuses on the constructed knowledge and personal history of the ethnographer.  In my time in the Arabian Gulf, I have noticed that many people arrive here with preset notions and, of course, find plenty of evidence to support their own preconceptions.  Germaine Greer toured Dubai on an open-top bus during a stopover and found plenty to criticise from her elitist viewpoint (the tour buses cost a fortune).  You don’t need to read the article subsequently published in The Guardian to know what she found; the heading is enough ”From its Artificial Islands to its Boring New Skyscraper, Dubai’s Architecture is Beyond Crass”

Taking comfort in the familiar in order to view the new

Admittedly, Greer does not claim to be an ethnographer yet her status as an academic, intellectual and cultural commentator might lead one to believe she would make an attempt at objectivity.  However, as Hine points out, there is a high level of subjectivity in ethnography.  “How can anyone document a reality external to self?  No-one is asocial and free from particular practices of knowing.”  As mentioned later in his text, there is the “distant ethnographer”, sitting on the verandah (or the top deck of an imported British tour bus) observing the natives as they go about their tasks.  Visitors to Dubai do the same thing and can be heard interpreting what they see within their own contexts.  It’s what we do when we encounter something new.  Our ‘a priori’

Would everyone recognise this as breakfast?

hypotheses, latent or blatant, quickly come to the forefront as we observe the groups before us; not being part of them, we perhaps feel a certain right to assess and pass judgement.  We also relate things back to what we believe to be the standard re Carol’s posting on Foucault: “The fundamental codes of a culture–those governing its language, its schemas of perception, its exchanges, its techniques, its values, the hierarchy of its practices–establish for every man, from the very first, the empirical orders with which he will be dealing and within which he will be at home”

In our Twitter feeds we’ve mentioned the role of arrival and Hine speaks about how this can anchor the ethnographer in the “culture” being visited.  My own personal experience of Gulf airports has always enhanced my attitude towards being here.  Compare Dubai with Heathrow and I know where I’d rather land.  And yet nowhere makes me happier than India; those airports are suffused with the tantalising smell of being there.  I feel the same about my online experience.  FB seems like a penance but it’s necessary to go there, from time to time, to keep in touch with people I like who would otherwise drift away.  There are sites I visit for work where I’m a signed up member and they fulfill a variety of needs, though I notice I usually switch off all chat entities as I want to go there, do what I need to do and then leave!  But my “happy places” online remind me of visiting my “happy places” in real life.  I sign in and relax as I chat with people, or root around looking for things or just listen to music or watch moving pictures. 

Not all means of arrival are the same.

That’s me as a member; my 3 categories of arrival are Heathrow, Dubai and Kozhikode: misery, efficiency, happiness.

As an ethnographer how to I slough off my attitudes?  Are all airports the same?  I know that they are not.  Are all online groups the same?   What I find most interesting at this stage of the process is the idea of not inhabiting space but following connections.  Initially I found Twitter twoublesome as the posts contain so many URLs.  The compulsion to follow every one was resulting in endless tangential journeys.  But with time and practice, it has become less of an ordeal and is a lot more enjoyable.  With the online group I have chosen to look at, I find that the same thing is happening.  Most of the posts contain links to other things outside the group.  Although you have to click a button to join the group, the membership process is not vetted and is instantaneous.  But it’s still a group and you still need to click that button, so it suggests a certain “walled garden” approach.  But the links paint a different picture of a porous organisation; less walled garden and more meadow where you may have to cross a stream to get there but it’s more of a burn than a brook.  So, there seems less need to arrive and a greater need to join the flow.

“Being there trumps all” and yet what does being there mean?  Despite my most fervent wishes, my tired old body still feels the physical reality of sitting on a chair at a desk or, if I’m lucky, lying on my bed.  My mind may wander around the virtual world but physical reality is also going to have an impact.  My “arrival” is coloured in a way that physical arrival is not.  Physical arrival is total submersion.  Everything from negotiating Customs to working out how to get from the airport to the next place you want to be requires the focus of all your senses and physical presence.  Online this is not the case; I can be aware of other events outside the realm of the online group and I can follow them; one eye on the news as I read the day’s postings or the secure knowledge that my dinner is sorted out instead of scouring the horizon for sustenance.  Sights, smells, sensations – all play a big part in arrival.  Can I, as amateur ethnographer, hope to experience the emotions, tensions, sounds and smells?  I can look, read, image and imagine but is that as deep an experience?  Referring back to the uncanny, I suspect that it can.  I remember once having a conversation with a friend broken into by, for want of a better word, a hacker.  The hacker was abusive in a silly way but even after I’d logged out, I felt the impact of having been harassed.  In a way, that gives me hope that my ethnography report is not going to be the dry stick it feels at pressent.

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This week I wanted my LifeStream to reflect what I actually do online rather than try to find things with which to fill it.

As a language teacher, much of my online presence is occupied with finding resources, practice materials and classroom stimuli, so I wanted these to feed into my life as a student.

I also decided that I should show some of the things that divert me and amuse me when I need a boost.  So, a couple of videos from YouTube, for example.  Perhaps not particularly edifying but definitely things I would miss if I didn’t have when I feel fed-up (long live Dawn French).

"Take a chance on Dawn"

There are links to some stories I’ve read and things I’ve been doing online.  This week I upgraded my iPhone and iPad to iOS5.  This was scary as I’ve heard lots of stories about things going horribly wrong.  They didn’t.  But since upgrading, I’ve been interested in iCloud and that’s in the LifeStream, too.  All in all, I realise that I’m not much of an active member of groups and that is also reflected in my LifeStream; I seem to enjoy dipping in to things I need or want without hanging around much.  In college, I’m part of a team that helps answer BBVista queries on our “Get Satisfied” site but that is strictly off-limits to the LifeStream, unfortunately.  Sadly, also discovered that the new Guardian App is not available here.  So, I’ll have to stick to old-fashioned reading the paper online.  So not cool!

Not scary at all!

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Maybe my comments about Zombies were not so tangential after all!

Zombie craze continues to infect popular culture

posted on the BBC site today.  And a curious story from earlier this summer

Zombie attack: Leicester city council overrun by ‘undead’

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The richer definition of uncanny provided by the Scots Dictionary confirms for me that the use of uncanny as a descriptive term when speaking about digital pedagogy is both apt and illuminating. (The following examples are purely personal and represent many hours of rumination as I drove back and forth to work.)

Back in the 1980s, there was a cabaret act called “The Joan Collins Fan Club”.  We weren’t digital then but key elements of that act illustrate the power of the uncanny.  This was long before Julian Clary was famous, so the act played in small clubs and was intimate and scary at the same time.  Clary would walk amongst the audience, selecting his “victims” for the evening.  A key part of his act was to take someone’s handbag or wallet and then go through it, item by item, dissecting their personality with acerbic wit.  This was buzzing around in my mind as I read about the power of the uncanny to defamiliarise conventional teaching practices.  Just as Bayne writes about the liminal area between what is perceived to be “normal” and that which is “troublesome” or “strange”, so the cabaret picked apart the artefacts that an “unstrange” member of the audience carried with them and could thus be assumed to be both personal and also having some value to that person.  As the dissection went on, those of us in the audience laughing at the jokes and banter were also left feeling distinctly uneasy; what would be made of some of the things I had in my pockets?  What would they say about me?  When laid out bare on the stage (or screen) what do our artefacts say in a voice that is not necessarily under our control?

“our actual and immediate activity on the network is less important than the presence of our representation, our ‘ghost’”

The unease/ amusement was accentuated when Fanny the Wonder Dog would do her impressions of famous people of the time.  It was ridiculous and yet, somehow, it worked: a dog in a wig was recognised as a member of the Royal Family.  For some of the audience, this display of “troublesome knowledge” induced anxiety leading to desires to disengage.  For most, however, it held a fascination and demonstrated the fluidity of our ability to process images and “ontological disturbance” in ways which created new meanings that had a shared provenance and resonance but also a particularly personal edge.

At the moment, I perceive the LifeStream to be a type of “pocket emptying”; what is to be made of what I carry around virtually?  As Bayne points out, there is a blurring of boundaries that leads to a redefining of identity.  As I have commented elsewhere, on the continuum of Absent to Present and back again, how is that reflected in my presence online?  While I may be tied up in meetings or lying on the sofa telling myself to do some work, that is not the presence that is represented online by my ‘ghost’.  That ghost may not register at all or may be seen as less ghostlike than I think.

O wad some Power the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us!
It wad frae monie a blunder free us,
An’ foolish notion:
What airs in dress an’ gait wad lea’e us,
An’ ev’n devotion!

Robert Burns here evokes the uncanny in that a louse wandering around a woman’s hair has taken on the presence of a phantomenological encounter.  A louse amidst the finery is mischievous and the author is near malicious in his analysis of what it represents.  We experience a new relationship with reality as we contemplate the appeal to a higher power; this is the power of the uncanny, providing us with the ability to see ourselves in new existences and from alternate existences.  (This is also why I think the word “strangeness” is just not strong enough.  Uncanny layers the experience with a myriad nuances that tap into, like hypertext, a wealth of other understandings.)

Which brings me to Zombies (this is a posting of tangents…)  A few decades back, Zombies were gross representations of the “living dead”; slow-moving, incapable of thought, driven purely by some supernatural instinct.  Now, that has changed.  In the recent TV series, “The Walking Dead“, Zombies have acquired human abilities; they have the sense of smell and taste, can use basic tools and have a primitive ability to hunt in packs.  And they’re not called Zombies anymore.  They are now known as “Walkers”, which sounds cosily human to me in a country where “mall walking” is a legitimate form of exercise.

This made me wonder if the on-going popularity of magic (Harry Potter et al) and the supernatural (all things Vampire, Undead and Super-Powered) is in some way a reflection of our attempts to reason out the impact of the virtual world on and in our lives.  It is no longer the case that the uncanny inhabit the dark nights and dark alleys of our imagination.  We have become uncanny in our flow through the digiverse but how to we process that?  I’ve probably gone too far off track in my thinking but I can’t help feeling that our attempts to humanise the unnatural are a reflection of our need to humanise the virtual.  We recognise the uncanny but do not seem able to embrace it in its entirety.  Therefore, we need to give it some of our attributes.

There seem to be far fewer “sleek shiny avatars” these days and far earthier, more nature-based representations.  We may give ourselves wings, horns or halos but it seems we need to deal with the uncanny by keeping a link to realworld human representation.  I don’t have one but I’ve been in cars where the car talks to you.  You can choose the voice you want it to have.  In my apartment building, the lift talks to me.  Admittedly, “her” repertoire is limited to telling me if I’m going up and down and which floor we’re stopping at but I find I do think of the lift as “her”.  (Other people hear her, too, so it’s alright.)

Courtesy of Mohammed Al Marzouqi as found on Facebook. He is a digital artist and can be contacted at Momorzq@gmail.com

In his article, “Unspoken Truths“, Christopher Hitchens writes about language and the power of the voice and how he has reacted to its weakening as a result of his cancer:

“Deprivation of the ability to speak is more like an attack of impotence, or the amputation of part of the personality. To a great degree, in public and private, I “was” my voice. All the rituals and etiquette of conversation, from clearing the throat in preparation for the telling of an extremely long and taxing joke to (in younger days) trying to make my proposals more persuasive as I sank the tone by a strategic octave of shame, were innate and essential to me.”

David Mitchell, author of “Cloud Atlas” spoke in a Guardian Podcast about the writer’s voice and how each writer needs to find it for themselves before they can produce a text.  As he says at the beginning of the podcast, it’s dangerous to think too much about who is reading your words as you can overanalyse and hency stultify the message.  He goes on to say that it’s not worth working out if you’re writing for “high brow” or “low brow”; there’s “just brow”.

I think that this is what Kress was getting at in his chapter.  He was pounced on for his comments on words as “mere signifiers” to be filled with meaning: “relatively empty signifiers”.  And yet, is he so far from the truth?  As a language teacher, I know that we often define words by saying what they are not.  For example, if I’m talking about drinking vessels, and I want to convey the meaning of “mug”, it would be very long-winded of me to try and describe a mug in isolation; it could potentially lead to confusion with other things that we drink from.  So, it seems easier to start with, “It’s not a cup.”  Move on to “It’s not a glass.”  Once that’s established, we can go on to clarify what features distinguish it from both cups and glasses, thereby pouring significance into the word.

There is also the role of nuance and with it the power of the idiolect; what do we bring to the meaning of words and how to we relate to them on a personal level?  For example, a typical British person is likely to have a fairly positive reaction to the word “dog” when discussing pets.  A Gulf Arab is not necessarily going to have the same reaction.  Although the word “dog” is clearly understood by both parties in terms of zoological terms, the significance of what that word signifies can be radically different.  The same is true of body language, visuals and a wealth of other communication devices.  I recall a new teacher to Saudi Arabia going into a children’s class and showing scenes from the movie “Babe: Pig in the City”.  Many of the boys didn’t even recognise Babe as a pig as they had never seen one before (they are banned in that country and their image is forbidden).  But as young religious scholars, they shared the horror of speaking animals.  What was a cute story of animal friendship in one context became a horror story in another.

Bearing all of this in mind, Kress makes the valuable point that the affordances of virtual semiotics allow us to compose, create and convey meaning in new ways that are perhaps not fully grasped until actually undertaken.  My visual artefact exercise gave me a whole new respect for Kress and helped me to grasp what he was saying.  If I was a non-English speaker and was to look up “uncanny” in either Cambridge or Oxford Online (two of the most used resources for English learners), I’d be left with a rather dry and perhaps confusing concept: strange, mysterious, unsettling.  Into these bare shells I need to pour my own representations of what that term means to me as I explore it in various contexts.  The Scots Dictionary will help to fill out the construction but no matter what a dictionary says, we do not know a word until it speaks to us in a voice we understand; a voice we have given it.

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The Dictionary of the Scots Language (online version) defines uncanny as:

DSL - DOST (Uncanny,) Uncannie, adj. Also: uncany, -kannie.
[Canny adj.] a. Malicious, mischievous. b. ? Aggressive, threatening. c. Unreliable, untrustworthy; incautious. — a.
Sum now, vncannie sawers, sew sum causes of contentioun betuene the Chanceller and the Gouernour; Dalr. II 58/24. — b.
Order to be taken for restraining uncany begers; 1631 Kirkcaldy Presb. 33. — c.
I [was] … made hopefull he would not suffer it be spoiled by the imprudencie of mony uncannie hands which are about it; 1638 Baillie I 100.
To make all, without dinn, march forward, leist his unkannie trewes-men should light on to call them up in their rear; 1639 Baillie I 211.

Cambridge Online goes for:

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Absence.  That’s been my theme and my motif for the last 2 weeks.  I have been largely absent from my LifeStream.  The usual bag of mixed reasons applies: a bout of flu, shaken up by a car accident (not serious), heavy workload due to assessments, dodgy internet service, a wonky laptop requiring reimaging, more dodgy internet connections.  Put them all together and days become a week and LifeWorld has reclaimed my soul from Digital World.  The question is: did anyone notice?  Does Digital World miss you?  Does its heart of code grow fonder as the absence grows longer?  The answer is no.

When was the last time your log in said, "I've missed you!"

My first reaction was guilt.  Feelings of niggling, unshuttupable guilt.  The word “should” figured prominently in my thinking as I drove home or sat in on presentations or caught the last 15 minutes of “Come Dine With Me” (as an ex-pat, such images of the Mother Ship are fascinating – a nation obsessed still with bedside cabinet secrets, overcooked meat and creme caramel…)  I should be doing things online.

Then, with my eyes red-rimmed with air-conditioning delivered flu germs, I lay down and thought, “Why?”  Just as I’ve noticed that many colleagues try to be much nicer on FB than they are in the coffee shop on campus, was I trying to be something I wasn’t in my Life Stream?  My internet usage focusses on gleaning articles of the right size, composition and topic to use in my classes.  Of making word puzzles and games using SCORM packages to be delivered in Blackboard Vista.  Or using SafeAssign to ferret out the plagiarists.  Do these things belong in my LifeStream?  If so, how to get them there?

But what also of all the things I can’t show?  I live in a country with very strict censorship laws.  While preparing my visual artefact, I wanted to use images by the artists Pierre et Gilles.  One of the images is banned here.  Not just on a macro level but also at a micro one, too ie individual pages in Flickr etc have been found and added to the banned list.  My employers check the internet for negative postings by both present and former employees.  So, how much risk do I take?  How much do I reveal?  Am I absent because I was sick?  Had a bit of whiplash?  Got too tired?  Or is it because the digital world opens up a world of possibilities but, as Hand pointed out, a world that is possibly more policed, more censored, more controlled than I can imagine?

Nothing is bio-degradable online.  Nothing is ever truly deleted.  Nothing is ever wiped clean.  Much has been made of the use of Social Media in the recent “Arab Spring” or the English riots.  Where’s the follow-up?  How many of the bloggers have been tracked down and subsequently arrested?  The digital world has much to offer but, as is often said of public opinion, while it’s voice is loud, it’s memory is short.  We invest time, effort, money, emotion in our digital selves.  The question I still can’t answer is why?

It can change your life.

Who is interested?  Does it matter if no-one ever sees your blog or your online creations?  Is it enough to know that you have created and it’s “out there”?  If I hide behind false ids to make my postings, am I being deceitful?  How much editing do I do when I’m deciding on what goes in to the LifeStream and what stays out?  Is my recent absence because I felt exposed?  Yes, a bit.  So much of what we do online is done in a bubble – we sit alone watching our words and images take on a new life on screen but, I suspect, do not necessarily compute the full impact of such words online to an audience that is potentially greater than fellow course participants, tutors and friends we’ve sent the links to!  This week, as I battled with a failing, creaking, groaning internet connection that is afflicting the Gulf at present, I found myself wondering about who might make what out of this type of digital presence.  Maybe too much thinking about the uncanny.  But it did make me take a moment (or several hundred moments) to ask; who’s out there and what are they doing with me?

"I can smell you!"

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The link to my visual effort “digital thali“. You can watch it frame by frame using the big central arrow under the screen or you can play it as a slideshow by clicking on the “More” button.

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On the surface at least it looks as if not much has taken place on my LifeStream this week.  I don’t want to flog last week’s metaphor to death but I feel as if I’ve been standing gaping at open wardrobes wondering exactly what to pack for the trip. The problem is, I feel as if I’m packing for someone else’s holiday.  It’s interesting to rummage around in someone else’s things but, at the end of the day, nothing really fits.  I need to find both my Blog and my LifeStream voice.  But the LifeStream needs more than a voice.  I want it to be vivid, visual and representational of what I do online. 

I’m running out of storage space on WordPress as I’ve been using too many images.  This has set me thinking of the limitations placed upon e-culture; you want to say “You said I could express myself and now I have to choose?” My personal task this week has been to closely look at how I use e-culture and how much of that I would like to share. My conclusion is that I, for the moment, I’m not comfortable with sharing! My LifeStream illustrates a small fraction of my e-usage. My task now is to see how much more of that unseen footage can be brought in.

Draw your own conclusions

As an aside, it turns out that comments posted on FB etc by former employees are being tracked and informal warnings issued. This may explain some of my unease at sharing too much!

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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.

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