Watching the clips to end the film festival week in Digital Culture was really upsetting. Can it really happen – where human and machine live in the same world? Do we have to add more/amend policies to include/accommodate machines in our world and become politically correct – Diversity, Equal Opportunity to name a few?
I was really sad watching AI – it really touched my motherly emotion. To see David’s emotion – how he was scarred by the actions of the human boys and being left alone in the wood by his human ‘mother’, wandering alone in the woods and meeting strangers, chased by human to be captured and destroyed in a show. And to see how determine he is to search for the blue fairy to make his wish/dream come true. I don’t think that I can separate my feelings towards machine if one day they will be living in the same world and contribute to the population. I am emotional enough to be apart from my mobile or have to be departed with my old car or laptop. I think we human do get attached to machine easily, it is part of our lives.
The first thing I did when I reached a laptop is to check my e-mail. To me this is a very useful part of information revolution as described by Castells cited in Hand. It brings my family and friends closer to me. One good example was at the weekend, my sister and I used Yahoo! Messenger and webcam to call our family. Later we used Skype to call mum on her mobile – we no longer have to worry about expensive phone bills and making schedule when to call to ensure they’re in at the other end and go for the cheap rate time. Its just brilliant!!! Using Facebook to keep up-to-date with family and friends back home. Not just able to know what they’re doing through their status update but also what they’ve been upto with the photos posted. For some reasons, I found that people share their photos more easily using the social website rather than when asked to send via e-mail.
One thing though that I do wish for is that the education institutions will think outside the box to embrace the digital culture among the digital native students. And staff are not skeptical about the technology and applications available out there that could help learning in a more exciting and engaging way.
