It’s hard to believe that Block 1 of the course is drawing to a close already. Looking back on my blogging activity over the last three weeks it’s incredible to consider what I have learned from the readings, tutorial sessions, Togethertube sessions and interacting with the blogs of others.
This week I enjoyed the group tutorial on Google Hangouts. It was good to put some faces to names and to discuss the course with my peers. It was handy to have the opportunity to discuss the visual artefact as it had been playing on my mind for a while.
Nevertheless, when it came down to it I really enjoyed creating my artefact. I guess the main reason that I was struggling was over the decision of what theme to cover. I mentioned during the tutorial that my head is full of new and interesting issues about cybercultures and it was difficult to filter through my thoughts to focus on one theme.
In the end I decided on the themes of cyborgs and the influence that cybernetics currently has over the human race and where pogress could take us in the future. My decision was inspired by the contents of an earlier blog post where I touched on the idea of collaborative thinking.
I had been reluctant to consider the possibility of technology penetrating the mind. But as we slowly turn into human/machine hybrids then perhaps we may start to behave more machine like – networked and efficient.
Thanks for this weekly summary, Stuart.
‘Looking back on my blogging activity over the last three weeks it’s incredible to consider what I have learned from the readings, tutorial sessions, Togethertube sessions and interacting with the blogs of others.’
I know that it’s hard to say very much in 250 words, but I would be interested to know what the main ideas are that you’ve pulled out from this block? Even better, you could perhaps link the main ideas to content from the preceding week’s lifestream, if that worked.
‘I had been reluctant to consider the possibility of technology penetrating the mind. But as we slowly turn into human/machine hybrids then perhaps we may start to behave more machine like – networked and efficient.’
At the danger of sounding mischievous, it does assume of course that machines are necessarily efficient! I wonder whether we have a tendency to conflate machines with efficiency and to place humans in opposition as distracted and flawed? And if so, to what extent does this kind of framing come from the depictions we find in popular culture (and particularly science fiction, as we saw in the film festival)?