Final

1. Book groups: the additional texts have been a key component of the course. How has the work in your book groups differed from that which takes place in our discussions of the other texts in class and elsewhere (plurk & blogs)? What kinds of discussions are possible in the setting of the book groups? What is not possible within these settings?

I found that my book group was very successful, everyone participated and the book was very entertaining. I was surprised that our book group worked out so well because we had to figure out how to set it up, with no restrictions or guidelines, this could have easily been a complete disaster. We were able to base our discussion off of some of the main topics in class and from the other books, and in addition we had the freedom to explore other issues and topics we had with the book, that we might not have been able to in class.
For our book group we took a different approach to discussion and used Facebook, which turned out to be very useful, our statements were able to be a lot longer than the usual 140 characters we are given on plurk. Facebook was very similar to a forum like format, instead of a blog all of our contributions were kept in the same place, making it very convenient. Facebook is also a place that I go everyday, which made it easy for me to keep up with the conversation. Our book was different from class because we did not talk face to face about the book, except for the couple of meetings we had in class. And we also did not have one person stimulating the conversation and trying to direct the conversation in a certain way, each of us posted topic meant to stimulate the conversation and most of the time they didn’t pertain to the topic before it, this made it so our conversation went in many unexpected directions. I think this made it very successful because we covered a lot of interesting things taking place in the book, instead of one or two that was stretched out into a long conversation. I think our book group differed quite a bit from what usually goes on in and out of class, except for the themes of the book that related to the other books and class discussions.
Even though I thought the book group was very successful if I were to do it again I would have done it a little different. During our short book group meeting in class I found that our discussion about the book flowed a lot better between us than it did through the facebook forum. I was able to get a better idea as to where we were at when we had our meetings and really get a feel as to how everyone else felt about the book when we used out human voices and not our keyboards to discuss the book. So I think that it would have been wise to get together and have one or two good discussions about the book. I also thought while reading it would have been nice to get on plurk and just say what I was thinking about what I just read as I was going along. I thought this would have been fun; a kind of note taking that others would comment on and be apart of. It would almost make us more closely linked together, as one, almost in the same way plurk does for the class. One final thing missing from the group was the teacher to point out themes and ideas that we may have missed that would have brought us closer to the theme of the class.

2. Plurk: Without it the class would not be the class. Using the texts we have read in class explain how plurk fits in with the issues of technology and the human body that we have discussed thus far.

Plurk, what do I have to say about plurk? I have to admit that when it was first introduced to the class as part of your grade, I had no I deal what the point was. I thought, well this is useless, every week we get an assignment to do on plurk and that’s it. Then I started sharing things with plurk, I carefully picked what I was going to share, then as the quarter went on I became less careful and just shared whatever I wanted. Finally in the end I realized what plurk is all about, it isn’t about the assignments (that became nonexistence in the end, which could be attributed to the high traffic and comments already occurring on plurk) or the karma level (even if it is fun to see how high it will be the next day), its about bringing a bunch of people (the big) together on one website to share 140 characters at a time (the small).
It is true that the class would not be the same without plurk, the heart of the class would be missing. Without the continual beat of the heart we would die and that is the same thing for plurk, without the constant plurking and responses plurk would die off. Everyone in class is a part of the super organism, known as plurk, and everyone keep the super organism functioning and makes it possible for it to continue to grow. Through plurk our class was able to function as one and always stay connected inside and outside of class. People have the opportunity to share things that normally they would not feel comfortable sharing in class, making the class even more successful because we were able to hear (read) even more opinions, expanding the class and giving it more depth.
With plurk we are able to create a kind of doppelganger of ourselves. When I am on plurk and blogspot I am no longer Kaitlin, but I am a piece of Kaitlin known as Babyduff, my physical self is different than the mask I put on for plurking. I can say things that I would not say in other situations, it gives me the opportunity to share what ever I please. The screen names we create are things that mask us from the world, but at the same time allow us to share who we truly are.
The technology world is evolving at an extremely fast pace and continues to get faster, as we saw in those wonderfully creepy videos. Plurk has come along with the new fad of “Twitter”, it may be much more under appreciated, even if it is a more efficient system. But it gets to the same point, the ability to give the world up to the moment update of your actions and thoughts throughout the day, giving the world the option of listening and commenting on your plurks. This technology allows you to put. Well “you” out there or at least a piece of you. This piece of you, no matter how much you share is very small compared to the larger technology it is contained in, known as the World Wide Web. Plurk is a nanotechnology, and the things we share on plurk is our nanotext. The final question is will we continue Plurk after the class has officially come to an end? Will we still have a need to put ourselves out there?

3. The Small: this class focused on the small—at least it was supposed to at this point—that is here at the end—what does “the small” mean to you? Draw upon our readings, discussions, random websites, to develop your position.

I look at the small a little differently than I use to, the small I thought about seems a lot larger than it use to, but at the same time some of the things I did not think of as small, seem very small now. Compared to the universe, even Earth, I am miniscule, makes me think that my life has no purpose when compared to the scale of everything. Even in terms of my life, what I’m doing right now (I guess it’s in the past now) will be very small in comparison to what I will do with the rest of my life. But naturally I don’t think that way, I am big because I am living in my life which is really my only concern and what I am doing is not insignificant when it is part of my day. But then there is the point if a pen that can have an entire book on it, which makes me feel that the idea of what is small, is hard to describe and figure out what it really means. I guess the small that relates to me is something I normally don’t think of as small.
Looking at the small in terms of technology has been apart of the class discussions, Plurk, Blogs and videos. One of my favorite class discussions we had this year was about aesthetics versus politics, these don’t seem to relate to the idea of “the small”, but I see them that way after looking back. These two views are so small in the scale of who a person really is, we are not concerned with why people have these views, and how they got to this point. We are more concerned with who they voted for or what CD they are playing in their car. These things are so small in comparison to who a person really is, but to us they seem really important and make a big difference. Plurk easily fits into the small because we are almost always able say as much as we want (with the exception of a text) and suddenly we have to express ourselves in 140 characters, quite small. Then there are our blogs which are small in a different way, I’m able to say as much as I want, but in comparison to the rest of the internet and the blog world, my opinion I put out there suddenly seems very small. We saw many videos this year, The Power of 10, which really showed us how small we are, as well as probably the most entertaining video with the Seven Dwarfs and the extremes they go to, to protect themselves from mosquitoes (small) and malaria (big) they bring with them that destroys your life. I found it interesting that something so small can seem like such a big threat to us. The small came up in many aspect of the class inside and outside and I also found myself looking for and many times missing the small that is in the books we read.
Many of the books we read, you had look at the small, not the book as a whole, to get something more meaningful out of it. In the case of the Filth it was extremely important to look at the small on every page, taking a Where’s Waldo approach to the pictures on the pictures. The pictures play just as big a role (if not bigger) in the theme and the story of the Filth as the dialog does. I found it especially interesting when the Mickey Mouse ears and Donald Duck were pointed out to me in class, these were something that blended into the back ground and if you scan over them and only look at the bog picture you will miss the hidden theme of the loss of childhood. I have always found it hard to find themes and points that are hidden within the text, I’ve never been good at finding and looking at the small within a book. This may be why for much of the class I was lost, the reading did not always make sense to me and the beginning of the discussions in class seemed out of no where, but eventually when the themes I looked over (usually the small) were pointed out to me, and it clicked. Everything works together and the small is extremely important to the big picture because without understanding the small you really don’t understand the big picture to it’s fullest potential.

4. Animals and Machines: our texts have been filled with both of these things. Working with Ribofunk and Ronell & Kac’s text Life Extreme, make a case for the difference between animals and machines. Is there such a difference? And where do humans fit in all of this?

I found it very interesting when animals became apart of this class, machines were always apart of the. And to think of the two as similar when they seem like opposites, one being man made and the other being organic. Oh wait…that’s the point not all animals are so organic anymore, we especially see this in Ribofunk’s “Little Worker” and the many horrifying pictures and descriptions in Life Extreme. I took a biology class last quarter that introduce DNA modifying, but I never thought of the extreme that Ribofunk took it to, which is starting to become a reality.
Ribofunku had many interesting stories in it, but one that suck out to me and we had a long discussion about in class was “Little Worker”. It seems unthinkable that science would think to create a hybrid of 12 different species, which include human and wolverine. The interesting thing is how all those species blend together and the consequences of mixing them in this way, it seems that the major conflict with this in the story is the unhealthy emotional attachment that Little Work takes towards her master. This story takes into account the consequences of playing God.
Life Extreme was an interesting text, using quotes along side pictures of beautiful thing or quite horrifying things. After reading each quote it does not seem that these would go along with some of these pictures, then you realize that the purpose of the book is to look at the beauty of the natural world, along side the effect humans are having on what should be beautiful, and take quotes that make you think about how past views don’t work any more because of human interaction.
During class we also got a real close look at technology and where it may be headed in Technocalyps. The fact that there could be robots that learn and develop in a very similar way to humans is scary. That we are making and heading towards the creation of technology that could lead to our demise as humans. Creating things that have the potential to be smarter and stronger than humans could ever be.
So where does this leave us? How does this all relate? I think it is obvious that now that humans have started to interfere with nature it has made them less than organic and more manmade. “Manmade” is not a word we usually relate to animals, but is more closely related to the machines we have invented. Machines are in no way natural, while animals would normally be without question considered natural, until now…It seem soon animals will become closer to machines than to what they originally were. What would Darwin say?
After describing all of this it seems that is now harder to find the difference between animals (modified) and machines. But they have to be different right? First of all animals will always have to be made up of DNA, no matter how different it is from its original form. Animals grow and develop in a way that machines will never be able to (at least I don’t think they will be able to), machines may be able to learn in similar ways to animals, but animals go through stages of development. Animals can evolve on their own, while machines must be change physically.
It seems that humans are the cause of all this, we use animals for experiments, usually in the hopes to better our life by finding cures for diseases. But we experiment on animals to see how much we can play God. First man created tools and then we created machine, all in an effort to create a better life. But now it seems that we are taking it to the extreme, I think eventually we won’t have to do anything, little machines like an iphone, will do anything we want it to do. There’s basically an app for anything already. I hope that’s all we have to worry about (not doing anything), not the machine that takes over the humans.
Well, after taking this class and thinking about how we are digging ourselves a hole through the constant need to create new things and change what is naturally there. And here I thought “The Inconvenient Truth” was all I had to deal with.

5. Doubles/Doppelgang: Beginning with our first novel, The Invention of Morel, the theme of doubles or copies has been coming up again and again. First, explain how you see the notion of the double in each of the thematic sections of the course:

1. The photographic double: Morel, The Ticket that Exploded, Film in general
2. The biological double: the clone, the splice, the twin
3. The double achieved through other means: brainwashing, time travel, pataphysics

Using these three types as a departure point explore how the concept of the double changes with the technology that produces it. Does the notion of just one double hold in the twenty-first century?

1. I never though of a photograph or a video of me as a double, I only considered it a capture of a moment in my life and in time. But after being introduced to the idea that a picture or video is me, just in another form, is an interesting concept. I live most of my life without it being documented by a camera, so I start to wonder what happens to the past me, I guess that means I no longer exists in any form. So there is only one of me, the present me. But what happens when on the rare, special or hopefully epic event that I do use a camera? This must mean that I am creating a double of myself that will forever be more than a memory of that moment or moments. This double can then be located in more than one place (does that mean there are multiple doubles of one moment?) on my computer, camera, ipod, album, disc drive and the list goes on and on. This double made through a camera is a part of me that is frozen in that moment that I can now look back on and bring up many of the feelings I had when that double was made.
2. The clone or the double is difficult to think about since it is not as closely linked to my life as a photograph is. We mostly talked about the clone as a doppelganger, which is an interesting concept. Someone who is biologically you, same DNA, but expresses itself in a different way than the original you does. The original self is raised one way and their experiences make them the person they are, so when a copy is made of that person it cannot be expected that the clone or doppelganger will have the same personality and act with the same restraints. I consider clones different people with the same DNA, similar to twins. I just don’t see people as defined by their DNA, but by their actions.
3. The most interesting and confusing video we watch all quarter was Primer, which dealt with time travel and the doubles that are created through it. This movie was very confusing to me so I don’t quite understand what happens to the doubles. I’m not sure if they disappear after a period of time or if every time they time travel they create another copy of themselves that lives until it dies like any other human. I got the feeling that they just keep duplicating copies of themselves and then those doubles start off with the same personality as the original (basically the same person), and then through their personal experiences they grow and develop on their own.

As far as the notion of one double existing in the twenty-first century, under these standards, does not seem plausible. Especially when a picture or a video is considered a double, then there is the development of cloning, which may not be preformed on humans, but more than one double of an animal is possible. I think it is hard to determine what the twenty-first century will offer in terms of doubles.