I’m now starting to get a feel for how the course structure can work for me and to home in on some of the core themes, after the initial excitement of getting to grips with this experimental format.  At first, I found the sheer volume of interesting information and links that the relatively small number of students on this course manage to generate a little overwhelming.   It wasn’t until the beginning of this week that I began to realise that it was OK not to read every linked article or watch every linked video. Firstly most of the linked content isn’t going anywhere and I can take it in at my own pace and secondly, I’m getting a feel for what will be most helpful to me and which links I need to follow and bring into this blog.

As well as, by inference (and possibly unintentionally), setting an expectation that the students on this course will have an “all singing, all dancing, expertly curated Lifestream” by the end of the course, Jeremy, our tutor, has helpfully summarised the key themes as:

• sentience
• almost human
• memory
• divisions between technology and humanness
• the preservation of the authentic human
• the Utopia and dystopia of technological intervention
• enhancement
• centring of the desiring human subject

I think two of my more recent and longer blog post have clear links to a few of the above themes and I will look to expand my thinking in those areas in the final week of this block and over the remainder of the course.