Week 8 Thursday Review

Well, the class discussion today + screening of a scene from the epic 3D film Final Fantasy: Spirits Within was itself rather spirited. Excellent thinking occurred today. Since there were numerous absentees, the following will help everyone stay together intellectually, at this late stage of our journey.

You can refer to the lecture notes I e-mailed.

We basically approached the idea, which is now resonating from several of our primary sources, that our living history at the level of the self involved multiplicity and flexible, affinity-based, temporary identities.

I asked the group to think about the prospect of our experiences transcoded as memory files, traded much like mp3s (I referenced the film Strange Days), and how this would affect the 'identity' of the Human subject we inherit from the past couple hundred years especially ...

This question came to focus much of our talk today. I kept playing devil's advocate by claiming that print, and maybe all media, have always transmitted 'memories' of experiences - but the startling thing about the idea of a memory file is that it would not have any mediating layers (paper, ink, book) except the pure neural electromagnetic signals found in the human body itself.

We watched some scenes from Final Fantasy where it is difficult, I claimed, to be entirely sure that what you see is not actually filmed actors as opposed to virtual actors, 3D characters.

I mentioned that the irony of postmodernism takes an existential tact, not just a literary or significational irony. The irony we find in many recent films has to do with existence in time and identity and memory - films like Total Recall, Momento, Matrix, Vanilla Sky, et al. What Haraway and Turkle refer to is existential irony, and it is furthermore intended to provoke action and thought.

Another question I posed was about the apparent ability or skill of detaching from one's individuality qua stable ego (psychology) and allowing many or multiple personae to evolve, in which various aspects of personal interest are played out in new ways. What is this detachment?

Also, how do new media themselves carry forth the multiple? I suggested that things like drop down menus, menu-driven controls, and three important concepts we already learned, are all involved:

• numerical representation
• transcoding
• modularity

On Tuesday I mentioned that even at the level of personal devises like phones, the modes and selves of communication are multiplying, rather than staying content within the medium of the mobile phone even with web access - the general shift seems to be toward web-enabled 'appliances' (as the CEO of Oracle ... described it), on which you can choose between phone, e-mail, IM, palmtop video-conferencing, web surfing, 'personal information management' apps, et al. And, if you buy Turkle's idea that each of these windows of interest are attention structures, windows of consciousness, or identities, then voila, we're seeing the multiplication of ideology again. This concept does seem to hold up on many spectra of new media, indeed.