Hello Myles, thanks for this fascinating and thoughtful weekly summary. I found the delivery – in your cyborg-voice – compelling.
I’ve just listened to it three times in-a-row. I think this really effectively shows how within digital educational environments there are particular opportunities to match the medium with the meaning, so that something like your voice becomes in itself a critical device. We’re all for this in the EDC course.
This is possibly by accident, but what I also liked was the contrasting representation between your own Soundcloud avatar and the ‘not-quite-human’ voice. While both are digital in that they depend on sophisticated processors and calculations, there was something about the juxtaposition that made me think about both the papers by Bayne and Miller in the way that they point to the complex nature of the relationship between human and technology.
In your summary I was particularly interested in your suggestion that:
‘In a future that will be dominated by more digitally representative versions of ourselves’
I wondered whether you meant this in specifically visual form, or whether you were alluding to ideas around machine intelligence and emotion, touching on some of the themes that have emerged during our film tutorial discussions? As time allows, I would be interested to read – or indeed, hear – more of your thoughts on this.
Meanwhile, I’m going to listen to the soundclip again.
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I really enjoyed your post as well, Myles. In thinking about your post, and now the comment referring to the statement, ‘In a future that will be dominated by more digitally representative versions of ourselves’, I recalled a movie I used to show my Biology students called “GATTACA”. (NOTE: GATTACA reflects the letters of the four primary amino acids making up the DNA molecule). In short, it is the tale of a man who was born naturally into a society where almost all “essential” humans were genetically engineered in some significant manner. He wanted to go into space so he “borrowed” the DNA ladder from another man and passed himself off as that man. True there isn’t much in this movie in terms of digital this or that. But what it does display is the length some may go to in order to represent themselves as someone, or something, other than what they truly are.
Is this not what most do in platforms like Secondlife and even Facebook or Twitter? We create digital alternatives to ourselves depending upon the medium we wish to interact with at the moment? Just thinking . . .