Jen's E-learning and Digital Cultures Blog

As Sian just commented, our first week of Twittorial experimentation has been both energetic and disjointed:

“I agree with the comments people have made that over the last week it’s seemed disjointed, and almost impossible to construct clear argumentation or a coherent line of discussion in Twitter. But perhaps it’s a mistake to look to it to do these things – browsing the blog postings, it’s clear that clarity and the exposition of ideas is happening in a big way there. Twitter seems to me to be working pretty well as a way of firing ideas around, of constructing this ‘ambient’ sense of course activity and energy. I’m really enjoying it for that.”

I thought it might be worthwhile to attempt a summary of the #mscdystopia discussion. If you want to refer back to the full discussion, you can find an archive of it at Twapperkeeper.

Quite a bit was said about the connections made in Bendito machine between technology, media and religion, and the representations of humans as helpless (even if implicated) in the face of technology’s malign and inevitable influence. Technology is represented as a series of false gods being mindlessly and violently worshipped.

James wondered whether there was the suggestion of a pre-technology state of grace, but generally the view was that this was a dystopic vision with no real redemption in sight – only additional cycles of worship and destruction.

The clip from 2001, Stop Dave, I’m afraid, seemed to many to imply more human agency in the relationship between human and computer, but the focus is resolutely on the machine itself as dangerous, agentic, controlling, rather than the corporate/political/technological/economic machinery which underpins and creates it. As Silvana points out, the computer could (and allegedly does, with HAL standing for IBM) act as a metaphor for that machinery. The tension then could be seen as being between the local/small/human and the global/large/corporate. However, another set of tensions between HAL as artificial, and programmed vs emotional (fearful, manipulative) and alive would seem to suggest an interest in the nature of the machine itself. Eneas interestingly described HAL as psychotic, with simulated emotion, and blurring the boundaries between human and machine, while Nicola and Sarah P discussed the notion of man as ’self appointed deity’, deciding what constitutes life and what constitutes the moral good.

Morality emerged as an issue in our discussion of the Internet is for porn (World of Warcraft machinima) film – the cliched and gendered positioning of female as morally judgmental (if unrealistic) while male is equated with baser (and more embodied) instincts was echoed in some of the discussion around this film, with a discussion about whether or not the net challenges such cliches. Larger issues of control and whose vision of the net predominates were touched on as well.

The computer virus, our final film of week 1, seemed to leave a number of us cold – ignoring (again) any wider political and technological context and suggesting an obsessive reliance on technology for all our communication. A few of us found it interesting in its conflation of the digital and analogue, but mostly it seems we just found it annoying!

Finally, there were some general discussions around the relationship of control of the media to power, and how this is disrupted online, the lack of control we experience online, and the sometimes pretty blurry boundaries between dystopic and utopic visions.

I know I haven’t captured everything – feel free to comment about other themes and discussions you picked up on. Furthermore, I only summarised what was in the tweets themselves, not the links out to other sites and longer blog posts, in the hope of illustrating the extent to which we did manage to engage with issues through the medium of Twitter.