Ai Weiwei

A Chinese artist named Ai Weiwei has been detained by the Chinese government for his anti-government views and his oppositional viewpoints.  The interesting thing about this man is he is an avid user of Twitter and Facebook as means for his social commentary, and many are saying that it is because of his use of these mediums that the Chinese government decided to take him into custody.  An interview with Radio Australia (located here: http://bit.ly/hM4YWE) shows how some experts believe Weiwei's abduction is in some ways caused by his presence on social media.

The Executive Secretary of China Human Rights Lawyers' Concern Group had this to say:

"Instead of just criticizing the government, he would try to make use of the internet as a tool, to call for people to do something funny - to ridicule the government and also to help the people to find the arrested or detained human rights defenders, in very creative ways. So I think he attracted so many people to follow him on his Twitter, so many people want to be his friend on his Facebook, so I think that's why the public security becomes so anxious about his influence."

The interesting thing about this excerpt is the notion that Weiwei's activism was not considered much of a threat until he took it to Twitter and Facebook.  Weiwei has been an activist for many years now.  The 53-year-old artist has had many things to say about the wrongdoings of the government, but it wasn't until he took to the web and had a platform that spanned nations and cultural divisions that he became a threat.

The internet offers us a great deal of potential for the furthering of democracy, but with that comes the increased scrutiny and censorship from oppressive governments.

"[Weiwei] would make use of very courageous ways to make other people think about the issues. So he became a very influential figure on the internet."

What kind of potential opportunities are presented by social media platforms to individuals in speech-restricted areas?

S/R Paper 3: eXistenZ

eXistenZ is a film directed by David Cronenberg that shows a world in which humanity has access to games that allow us to fully engage as active citizens in a virtually real world through the use of “game-pods” that connect into our body through “bio-ports” in our spine.  Allegra Gellar is introduced as the “world’s greatest game designer,” and the film opens with her leading a test group of consumers through a trial of her newest game called eXistenZ. After an attempted assassination on Allegra’s life, marketing trainee Ted Pikul evacuates the area with Allegra.  Fearing that the game may be corrupted, she believes she can only fix it by bringing “someone friendly” into the game with her.  A man at a gas station who is bent on killing Allegra injects Ted with a bio-port despite him having a “phobia about having his body penetrated surgically” so that he can go into the game with her, but the bio-port ends up being faulty and damages Allegra’s game-pod.  When the game-pod is repaired and Ted receives a new bio-port, both Allegra and Ted enter the game. Involved in a new virtual world, Ted finds it difficult to distinguish between real and virtual. “What about our new identities?” Ted asks.  “They’ll take care of themselves,” Allegra responds. Ted finds himself doing things that Allegra says are his character and not him, offering the viewer the question of whether or not virtual reality can go too far and blur the lines between what is reality and what is virtual. Feeling compelled to act uncontrollably, Ted builds a gun from his food at a Chinese restaurant and kills the waiter thinking he was an enemy.  Ted eventually finds out that the waiter was actually their contact and that a man named Nourish is a double agent. Allegra almost bleeds to death after an infected pod is cut from her body, but she survives and stabs Nourish in the back. Allegra and Ted wake up in the ski lodge where they started, but a game character comes in the room showing them that they are not yet back in reality.  Allegra kills Ted after she believes he is conspiring against her, and they both wake up to find themselves in a room hooked up to a virtual reality game called tranCendenZ.  Ted and Allegra eventually kill the designer of tranCendenz, but the viewer is left uninformed about whether this occurred in real space or in the virtual space.

eXistenZ continually projects a world saturated in technological innovation and virtual realities where the line between virtual and reality is blurred to the point of confusion.  Ted is faced with multiple situations throughout the film where he has anxiety about the nature of the virtual space and is compelled to say and do things he doesn’t want or intend to say or do. “I find this disgusting but I can’t help myself,” Ted says as he eats a meal of obscure and unappetizing creatures. Cronenberg communicates a world that allows us to be someone we are not, and proposes that there are instances in the virtual space where we are compelled to be something we are not.  In the virtual world, Ted proposes that there “is an element of psychosis.”  The world according to eXistenZ is a world that occurs in the virtual space.  A feeling of psychosis, according to Allegra, is a sign that “the body is fully engaging with the gaming architecture.”  Fully engaging in the virtual world means loosening the grasp on what is real and what is imagined or programmed.  At one point, Ted pauses his virtual life in eXistenZ to return to his “real life.”  When he gets there, however, he says that his life feels “completely unreal.” eXistenZ explores the world according to technology and ultimately argues that technology is shaping our reality.  The viewer is intentionally unsure of what is reality and what is the virtual world, exploring the ramifications of a reality unified with technologically created spaces.  In this world, eXistenZ argues, we are no longer unsure of what is real around us, we are unsure of what is real within us as well.  Identity takes on a more fluid form, bending and transforming with the external environment.  At the end of the film when the group is in the appearance of reality, the game designer says, “we’re back but I have a feeling some of our crew doesn’t realize it yet.”  

Digitally Divided

In her piece "The New Digital Divide," Marcia Stapanek analyzes the way our personalization of information on the web has segregated us from one another, creating a divide in the online space where we cannot actively engage with other people.  She advocates for a more active online community by stating, "we must stop assuming that civic engagement will occur online on its own."  With her article, she analyzes the notion that "data-filtering" isn't a new phenomenon, but it is becoming easier and more destructive with the advancement of technology.  Ultimately, Stapanek argues, the once dreamed about internet that promoted democracy and open communication has turned up thus far to be a fantasy, and unless we actively engage the digital space in a new way we will never see an online space that inspires and encourages open communication between members of different belief systems, attitudes, and traditions. 

She ends her piece with a question saying, "Does the surge of online social networks and corporate use of Net filters to segment consumers of their products make it harder for people to engage with one another -- in or out of the workplace?"

I would answer her question with a resounding yes.  The segmentation of humanity into a society that lets us pick and choose the information that we feel is convenient and entertaining to us creates an environment that makes us less likely to be put in environments where we have to encounter information that we don't agree with or don't like. 

Our culture lets us personalize our news with things like Google News and blogs subscribing to a particular political leaning. Because of this, "we must work harder to break out of all of these self-imposed (or machine-imposed) comfort zones if we're to affect social change," Stapanek states.  I couldn't agree with her more.  If we are to build a democratic environment in the online space, we must enter into communities that allow us to engage opposing viewpoints and we must engage them on a respectful, civic, and ethical level. 

Let's engage each other in a civic way. We can even start now! If you disagree with me (or agree with me, for that matter), express your opinions freely.

With all of these negative sides being discussed in this post, what do you see as the positive attributes of data-personalization on the web?

Privacy and Augmented Reality

After reading Benkoil's piece, "How The New York Times, Others Are Experimenting with Augmented Reality," some of the predictions made in Neuromancer can be seen in the present day.  Augmented Reality is, by design, a convergence of the physical and technological worlds. The article defines AR as “layering digital information onto the physical world." With AR, the physical and the virtual become one stream of information and become a single medium.  With a smart phone or portable electronic device, Augmented Reality has potentially boundless limits.

The article mentions multiple examples of how AR is being used and pushed in multiple mediums, citing everything from Esquire magazine's plans to integrate AR into their reader experience to how the U.S. Postal Service uses AR to help customers decide how big of a box they should buy to ship their goods.  The article, overall, is showing that more companies, groups, and individuals are investing time and money into Augmented Reality technology because they believe that it is useful and marketable in the future.

With a greater push for AR technology, however, comes a greater need for adequate measures to protect the privacy of, well, just about everyone.  At the very foundation of AR is the ability to gain access to information about the physical world that is not explicitly in sight.  This creates what the article calls the "creepiness" factor.  The author is right when he says that "it can be frightening to think of the possibilities for invasion of privacy."

With more money and more time being invested into AR, we should push for legislation to ensure that the development of these products does not disrupt the privacy of everyday individuals and businesses.  Imagine a world where someone can point a camera phone at you and gain access to your Facebook profile, name, phone number, or personal information based on face recognition gained through Augmented Reality.  AR has many positive projections (like the ability to know more than meets the eye) but we must be careful and invest cautiously into the technology, making sure we protect privacy along the way.

What do you think is the best way to protect privacy in AR?

S/R Paper 2: Neuromancer

“The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel,” (3) Neuromancer by William Gibson begins, imagining a world where the virtual and the physical collide. Gibson creates the term cyberspace, calling it “a consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of people” and predicting a dystopian world where cyberspace is an engulfing reality (51). The main character Case and character Molly Millions develop a close relationship that provides them with a shared mission to steal the consciousness of other human beings, raising the question of what it means to be human in a world where consciousness is downloadable and can be stolen and experienced by others. After investigating the identity of Armitage and revealing that he has a former identity of a Willis Corto, Gibson explores the meaning of identity in a digitized age. Case is “hungover and confused” when he discovers this, and Case asks the computer to read printed materials to him, which he says leave gaps about Armitage’s past identity (79).  The blurred lines of the physical body and virtual creation become blurred in the novel, revealing a prediction of a super technological world that allows for technology to be implanted inside of the brain and for the virtual world to be experienced with the senses.  Case has internal organs that are technologically enhanced. Peter Rivera, a drug addict who is able to create holographics with implanted pieces of technology inside of his brain, leads Case and Molly to an being containing artificial intelligence called Wintermute.  The artificial intelligence that exists in this novel raises questions about the extent of technological creations, and whether or not they will ultimately equalize themselves to the same level of reasoning, consciousness, and emotion that human beings contain.  In the close of the book, Case spends the “bulk of his Swiss account on a new pancreas and liver,” further showing Gibson’s notion of a world in which the human body and the machine are blurring together (260).  In the intricacies of the plot line, Gibson is displaying a broader point: that a world that blurs the natural and virtual provides complex consequences.

With Neuromancer, Gibson spends time showing a world that is filled with artificial intelligence. 3Jane and Molly are talking in chapter 19, and 3Jane tells Molly that her father killed her mother because “she imagined us in a symbiotic relationship with AI’s, our corporate decisions made for us” (220).  In Gibson’s futuristic world, artificial intelligence is a reality that is as smart as the human race, able to make decisions and make them for us. “Listen,” Case says, “that’s an AI, you know” (108)?  Neuromancer explores the implications of a society heading in that direction, using the matrix as a prediction for a virtual world that allows users to become involved on a sensory level with a technologically created reality.  Case feels things in the virtual world, predicting a reality that we currently live in.  With the integration of the virtual experience into the physical experience, we may become involved with technology on a level that goes much deeper than simply experiencing or interacting with it.  We are, like Case in the novel and like Gibson predicted, growing more involved with it.  Just as Case “tried to scream” when he “jacked in” and found “nothing” but a “gray void” that contained “no cyberspace,” Gibson predicts a world in which humanity will try and scream in the absence of a virtual connection because of our dependence on it (225).  Walking into a room in chapter four, Case sees booths that “lined a central hall” and were inhabited by “clientele” who were young, “few of them out of their teens” (55).  Case notes that they “all seemed to have carbon sockets planted behind the left ear” (55).  Gibson’s book goes to show this reality in society, that youth metaphorically have sockets in their heads, constantly plugging in to virtual outlets and constantly being plugged into by virtual mediums.  Gibson blurs the lines between technology and humanity with Neuromancer, imagining a dystopia that is being realized in society today.

Neuromancer 19-24

Many of the predictions made in Neuromancer ring true today.  It became apparent to me in the last section of this book that Gibson predicted the internet to be an inhabitable space, as he describes Case as he "jacks in" to the virtual world.  Case can sense and experience the virtual world that he is in just as our virtual world today can be experienced on a sensory level. 

I was reading an article called "Neuromancer: What It Got Right, What It Got Wrong" after I finished the book.  The article can be found at the following link: http://goo.gl/8Gq00.  In this article, Mark Sullivan says that "Gibson took the World Wide Web much further. By introducing the concept of cyberspace, he made the Web a habitable place, with all the world’s data stores represented as visual, even palpable, structures arranged in an endless matrix." 

"Anything you want, baby," Zone drawled, "just hop it for Lonny..."

"No," Case said, "use the Finn."

As the Zone image faded....(Pg. 218).

Gibson proposes a world that contains more than just a virtual element, it posses a virtual reality that is integrated into everyday life.  Case interacts with a virtual image and speaks to it, listens to it, and interacts with it. 

Our world is moving more and more towards this prediction.  The lines between the virtual world and the physical world are being skewed, as the virtual and the physical worlds mold into one. 

And because of this expectation of virtual reality in our daily lives, when it is not there we don't really know what to do with ourselves.  "Nothing. Gray void. No grid, no cyberspace...he tried to scream" (Pg. 225).

The terror that comes to Case when his virtual environment is nonexistent is fascinating.  Do we, as an increasingly technological society, have this same type of reaction when our virtual outlets are offline or out of commission? 

Gibson's Neuromancer may seem far-fetched, but it may not actually be that far from the truth.

Neuromanced

Gibson lives in a world that is created with the collision of the technological realm and the natural realm. His fictional tale has enormous implications for our current culture.  Specifically, in chapters 1-9 I was struck by how surprising the natural world seemed to the characters who are accustomed to a technological culture.

Finn points a horse out to Case and says, "It's a horse, man. You ever seen a horse" (Pg. 88)?  This seems like a ridiculous question to be asking, but in a world that sees a collision of the natural and unnatural worlds, Gibson is making a point that the natural becomes almost obscure.

The ramifications of an increasingly technological world are innumerable, and we can see them in every aspect of our lives.  From our GPS systems to our social networking tools, we are seeing technology replace what used to be accomplished in strictly the natural world. 

Gibson creates an illustration of this collision between the natural and virtual world by describing a scene like this:

"Rain woke him, a slow drizzle, his feet tangled in coils of discarded fiberoptics" (Pg. 113).

With the natural process of rain and the unnatural and technological object of fiberoptics, Gibson is showing us that he sees the technological world and the natural world growing together.

This leads me to my question.  What kind of challenges does the integration of the natural and technological world pose to our social interactions and our social structures?