The Final

2. Plurk:

            What can I say about Plurk? After the first day of Nanotexts I was overwhelmed, I was going to be reading many more novels than I ever thought I would be in only one quarter, I was going to be writing a blog every week about those books and on top of all that I was going to have to figure out how to work this new technology entitled Plurk.

            When trying to explain this class to my friends it find it very difficult because none of them have ever really written a blog, let alone even heard of Plurk. They all sort of look at me with very confused expressions. Even today after spending 10 weeks in this class, I still find it hard to fully describe what plurk is. I suppose it is an information sharing site that it unlike anything that anyone has ever really seen before.

            After almost completing this course, I cannot see how it would be remotely the same without the use of Plurk. On the first day I remember Tony saying something along the lines of, “With plurk we will become one large super-organism, all moving as one.” And in a sense we really did. Each day about half of the students brought their laptops to class and decided to contribute in that manner.

            There was one day when it was decided that there would be little to no verbal communication at all. Those people with their computers had meaningful conversations about the texts we were reading at the time while the rest of the class had the opportunity to go up to the front of the class and use the main computer to communicate through Plurk.  This class secession was interesting to me, the conversations through plurk were different from the ones we had in class because when one is talking through plurk they have to pay attention to the number of characters that are used. They have to think about the small.

            The word ‘nano’ means very small or minute. In this class of Nanotexts, we have been looking at the small and how it is important to the big, the rest of the world. Before this class I didn’t take the time to think about the little things in life such as pollen or scale that make such a large difference in our world. 

            When reading the Filth it really made a difference when I found myself only looking at the pictures or only reading the text. With this graphic novel it really mattered that I looked at the small and paid attention to everything going on in order to fully catch what the story was about.

            In book group I read Midnight Robber, and in a sense Plurk can be related to this as well, there is the web that Tan Tan is trying to be liberated from but in the end she cant be. Plurk is very much like a web, if not like the web in Midnight Robber, than just like a web in general. All of us who talk though Plurk are intertwined in the web whether we want to be or not. Being in this class means that we are part of something larger than ourselves; we are part of a super-organism.

            Nanotext truly would not be the same class without the use of Plurk. It has opened my eyes to the small and will forever have changed my view of the world.

        

3. Blogs:

         I just finished reading Kaitlin Duffy’s blog and I really enjoyed reading about the class from the viewpoint of someone else going through the same thing that I was. I now know that I was not the only person who was slightly confused at times and completely lost at others.

            She opens her very first blog with, “These first few days have been an interesting experience for me, and continue to be. I am lost some of the time, but most of the time I am consumed by curiosity. This is a new way of looking at the world. So here goes my first Blog.” I remember feeling the same way even though I did not post it in my blog. I too was confused and still am from time to time during the class.

            “One day artificial intelligence that we create may leave us behind unless we are able to evolve as quickly as it does. But humans cannot possibly evolve as quickly as we are evolving artificial intelligence, so the only solution seen by many is to become robotic in a sense ourselves. Through technology it is believed that the human life will be extended, from 80 years to hundreds and hundreds more. I don't believe that technology should extend our lives longer than what is natural, technology should only be used to cure and keep people healthy so that they can live to natural old age.” Blogged Kaitlin. This seems to be a main theme that we saw throughout the course of this quarter with this class. When we were watching the various movies they kept reminding us of what is coming, more and more technology.

            “The advancement of technology cannot be stopped, but I believe eventually there will be regulations placed on the advancements. People fear what they cannot understand and I definitely now fear technology and I sure don't understand it. The movies Eagle Eye, Pulse and other horrible science fiction movies didn't scare me, I actually laughed them, but this Technocalyps Part 1 definitely did the job.” I couldn’t agree with Kaitlin more, I was scared out of my mind when watching the movie Technocalyps Part 1 although I don’t remember blogging about it. I enjoy the technology that we do have today and I look forward to the advancements that computers will make in the near and distant future but I in no way am looking forward to technology totally taking over our lives. I love my life the way it is but I fear that as we progress and evolve that our dependence on technology will get out of hand and be too much for us to even survive.

            “As humans, we have a need to know. But at the same time there are things we don't want to know. We shut ourselves down when something is being said that we don't want to know, we avoid truths that can hurt us. Or maybe it is more dignifying not to know, respecting someone when they tell you to drop it or knowing that not knowing is safer. There is a relief of not knowing or an intense feeling of curiosity.” I can see this in my everyday life and in this class as well. When we were reading books that were more ‘conventional’ it seemed that the class had more to say about the topics at hand, maybe this was because there was more to talk about with these books or maybe it was because more of the class had actually read them. Speaking only for myself, I can say that I did not finish reading The Ticket That Exploded, the cut up text was too much for me to comprehend and I did not enjoy reading about the topic on hand. This relates to Kaitlin’s blog because she is talking about knowing and now knowing. When attempting to read The Ticket that Exploded I found myself not wanting to know and therefore I started not paying attention to the topic at hand.

            As humans, there are certain things that we are comfortable with and there are others that we really aren’t. It is different for all of us and I can only speak for myself when I say that I am not in general very comfortable reading about sex in the very graphic sense. Many of the texts that we read in class involved sex that was very descriptive and it made me very uncomfortable at times. The only explanation that I can think of as to why it would make me so uncomfortable is that sex really shows how cruel some people can be. It is a weapon in some senses and it shouldn’t be.

            My experience in this class has been an interesting one, I have totally changed my point of view on many aspects of life and I have formed new opinions of some things. Reading Kaitlin’s blog was great because it helped me to realize that I was not the only one having some of the thoughts that I was having throughout the class.

 

1. Others:

            When reading Radical Alterity by Jean Baudrillard and Marc Gillaume it made me think back to high school, when I would be in a sporting event against a rival high school or maybe walking down town and seeing someone with a sweat shirt with the mascot of the other school. They were considered the other to us because we knew just enough about them to know that we didn’t like them; I mean they went to the other school; of course they were less than us. But at the same time we knew hardly anything about each one of them individually.

            But of course this book was not about high school rivalries, not even close. I wrote a blog talking about this book and a quote from it on page 85, “you can enjoy all of the positive aspects of your own culture, but you also absorb all of its stupidity; you are much more sensitive to it than in other cultures. So it always feels good to get away from your culture.” This was one of the only things from the book that I almost fully understood. I know what it feels like to travel to a foreign country and look back at your own culture in disgust. Living in France was one of the best things that I could have done. I gained so many life experiences and I am so thankful to have had the opportunity to go. I was able to really see what a different country was thinking about us, without having to filter the information and opinions from second hand sources.

            For me, being someone who is rather technologically ignorant, I found plurk and blogging to be a bit of a learning curve, the other for me. I had never heard about plurk and I had never thought about writing a blog, it was never really something that interested me until I started taking this class. The other in my eyes is something that is out there and is different for everyone. I know that many people in this class had been involved in blogging in the past and so for them maybe plurk was the other. It was something that they had to take time to figure out and work with. Through plurk it seemed that the students could be who ever they wanted to be. They could recreate themselves if they felt like it. With the option of making our names to be what ever we wanted, the otherness started right off the bat. When given the ability to make your name whatever you want it gives the creator the chance to truly become their other, or at least become closely acquainted with it.

             The other can really be anything. Before taking this class I had thought of the other as being aliens of some sort. It seemed logical to me to think about life on different planets as being ‘other’ to us humans. On a clear night my favorite thing to do is to get away from light pollution and just look up at the stars. I cant help but to think that with all the space out there it is almost impossible for there not to be life out there somewhere. No one knows what these other life forms would look like if they exist. And no one knows where to look for them either and this is what makes them ‘other.’ The fact that it is entirely possible that there are other beings somewhere in space just proves that we all have our ‘other.’ Something that is totally foreign to us. But yet is quite possibly very similar to us as well.

 

2. The Small:

            What can I say about the small. The small is something that I never really thought of before this class. Before taking Nanotexts the closest I got to thinking about the small was seeing how little I could make my hand writing to fit on a note card for a study guide. Looking back at this, it is very close to what the class was about. Although my handwriting got increasingly worse as it got smaller, it was cool to see how many words and how much information I could fit onto one small 3x5 inch piece of paper.

            The Nanotext class started with the small during the first week of us meeting. We watched the movie entitled, ‘The Power of Ten’ this movie was simple and very easy to understand and it made me think about how small humans really are in the big scheme of things. When film first starts with the shot of the couple sitting on the picnic blanket and then zooms out by a power of ten every few seconds, passing the City and State limits, expanding past the world, looking at the milky way and even farther. It really goes to show that we are very minute when you consider how much space is out there in the universe and beyond.

            As a bit of a side note: The universe is big. So big, that just that fact, just it’s mere bigness, is enough to blow your mind. And it just keeps getting bigger. If you were to look outside at night, and stare at one spot you wouldn't see it but there are approximately 10,000 galaxies in your field of vision. Each of those galaxies contains anywhere from ten million to one trillion stars. The average star is roughly a million times the size of Earth. And yet, with all that junk, the Universe is more than 90 percent empty space. All of that, in this tiny spot.

            Just thinking about the largeness of the universe makes me think about how small we all are. Paying attention to the small things in life is important to understand the big picture. When reading The Filth, it was extremely important to both read the text and follow along with the pictures. When I found myself not looking at the pictures I had to reread the pages because I knew that I would have missed part of the plot.

            It was the same with reading Radical Alterity, there were portions of the book that I did not understand and I believe that the reason I did not understand it was because I was not reading it closely enough. If I had been reading it with the small in mind I am sure I would have understood the concept more fully.

            It is the small things in life that makes the difference. Three weeks ago I was sitting in Red Square for about 3 hours working on some homework, after the day in the sun my throat started hurting like nothing I had ever felt before, we thought it was a cold of some sort but after going to an Urgent Care facility it became clear that I was allergic to something in the air. Pollen is a substance that many people don’t consider to be harmful of even noticeable. It can be just as harmful as a virus and in many different forms. Similar to pollen there are the many viruses of the world. These viruses enter our bodies in many different ways and will affect all of us differently depending on our different immune system.

            The small is something that I will now be thinking about in my day to day life and in the classes I will be taking in the future here at Western.

3. Animals and Machines:

            In my mind animals and machines are two very different species, if the word species is even the correct word to use when talking about a machine. There is a hierarchal system and at the top there are humans, closely by animals, and then by machines. Animals have feelings, beating hearts, and life.

            A huge difference between animals and machines is the fact that Animals can feel. They can feel pain, loss, joy and happiness. All these different emotions are part of what makes them closer to humans and what makes them different from machines. Another reason animals are above machines is because they can reproduce and machines cannot. Through reproducing we find love coming from the mother to her babies (in most animals), this is a love that you will never find when looking at machines.

            Machines are manufactured by humans, we built them and we know how to take them apart without too much trouble. This is another reason why they are at the bottom of my list.

            But what about “Little Worker” from Paul Di Filippo’s Ribofunk? She was a hybrid of sorts, with the emotions of a human but the ruthlessness of an animal when protecting a loved one. This is a rare species and not one that is currently out there roaming the streets of Bellingham, let alone the rest of the world. Not yet at least. With the advancements of technology basically anything is possible in the future.

            There are a few reasons why humans are at the top of my list. The biggest thing is that as humans we have written language. Other animals have communication; in fact all animals have some sort of communication. It is the fact that we, as humans, have written and spoken language that sets apart from the animal world. There are animals out there that are just as smart if not smarter than humans and yet we are at the top of the food chain. We have evolved enough, to the point where we have this technology all around us, some that we have no idea what to do with. There is no one person that we can thank for starting the ball rolling for technology, all I know is that each year, heck every day technology improves from the day before. Everyday humans are making advances in the world and there is no end in site.

 Something that I have never been able to understand is why humans consider it to be just and acceptable to kill others for no reason at all. “That person has a different religion to me, I think I will kill them.” The world does not work like that. It is things like genocide that make me question myself when I put humans at the top of the hierarchy. Some of us humans don’t deserve it, some of us are not better than animals. There are even some humans who are so trained and brainwashed that they will just follow orders and not question authority at all. These people are more like machines than anything else. The people who are on the killing side of genocide have no feelings, no hearts and therefore they are no better than a common machine. They are no longer human.