Bill's E-learning and Digital Cultures Blog

Most of my activity was devoted to commenting on the short films via Twitter. Judging by the number of lifestream posts, this was a week that really worked for me reflection wise and learning wise; as Andy said in our Skype chat, it was like visiting a gallery, standing in front of paintings and eavesdropping on the comments of all the other visitors that stood close by. I reread my tweets and a couple of interesting points stood out:

a) Efforts to foresee how our cyber future will be haven’t really progressed a lot in the past few decades (at least as far as pop culture is concerned) and lack originality. Some of the key issues come straight from Philip K. Dick novels of the 60’s and Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984). Also, in the age of wireless communications, we probably need a more up-to-date, less stereotyped visualisation of cyberspace, be it dystopic or utopic.

b) Technology is giving robots and machines human traits (synthesized voices, anthropomorphic appearance, intelligence, existential blues etc.) and slowly turning humans into “robots”. Could it be that in all those “rise of the machines” dystopic cyber futures, we are the machines that revolt?

* this post was written while listening to “We Are the Robots” by Kraftwerk.