Ulmer and Bradley McGee: Monumentality, Emblems, and Egency

In the two chapters for this week, Ulmer discusses the way emblems are supposed to be considered for the monument, as well as the way we might some new form of agency in the age of electracy. Ulmer also draws out the MEmorial for Bradley McGee, a two year old boy who was tortured and killed by his father for soiling his pants. Ulmer weaves the abjection of child abuse throughout these two chapters while continuing to expand on the method for creating a MEmorial, oftentimes quickly oscillating between the two. The effect, it seems, is purposeful: to draw us into the chorography by so quickly switching between these two distinct narratives.

The Emblem

In some ways the emblem is the same kind of logics Ulmer has been working with all though the book, except in this case the productive element is more imagistic than verbal or technological. The idea is to mix a motto, a picture, and an epigram in order to create/illuminate meanings that might not be captured through traditional narratives. This relationship, or this disruption, comes from semiological reasoning where words become connected to visual items, most famously a tree in the case of Saussure. The meanings of each of the parts need to correlate with the meanings held by an audience, so it seems like the emblem (for the moment?) is less about the ME and the punctum, and more about the production of new relationships and ideas between these items in order to translate the narrative forms of literal argument to the tangled meanings of an electrate creation.

Where this does connect back to the ME in the MEmorial is that to create an emblem it takes a step toward the testimonial, which is to say a step toward an electrate documentation of the disaster. Part of both the chapters move to Maurice Blanchot’s Writing the Disaster in order to talk about violence in the way we typically do, as people getting hurt or killed, and the violence that is inherent in language, which is to say the way defining words is an act of confinement (and even etymologically, death). This connection between writing and disasters brings an interesting point of contact between literacy and electracy as they function toward violence.

In an extension of writing metaphors, as well as the Brian McGee story, Ulmer draws out the connection between writing, excrement, and childhood. Fecal matter, in some ways, is deeply personal in that it comes from inside of us, plus it allows for us to enter into a relationship with our bodies where we are both putting intense pressure on our bodies and relieving ourselves—this can be seen as a pleasurable thing. All through the chapter, Ulmer highlights stories of children who were tortured for “soiling” themselves, and helps us make the inference between the abuse and the fecal matter. But the analogy doesn’t stop there. Ulmer also works through some of the ways that pooping and writing can exist as a similar process. With great difficulty and social pressure we push our writing excrement into the world, and then we take this deeply personal thing and push it as far as we can away from ourselves. This connection, and possibly the lesson that we’re supposed to learn from these connections between abuse, feces, and writing, is that we need to connect the abject emblem together through the concept of “formless value.” This is to say that we should not force the parts together because we want or need them to go together, but allow them to more naturally come together in order to create the emblem, or the memorial.

The Agency of the Image (Upsilon Alarm)

This chapter, for me, appears to further elaborate on the theme of what is “formless” but in order to talk about how we, as individuals, create a sense of agency, and less about how the bits exist together on their own. It is not our own agency that constructs the connections, then, but the image itself. In line with the idea of puncepts and conductive reasoning, Ulmer advocates for inventing via the crossover between the mood in our state of mind and the mood in our language. This brings Ulmer to talk about the letter Y at length, ultimately to intertwine the letter with the word “why.” This connection works to talk about the letter Y as a metaphor for the separation and re-tangling that happens when the concepts come back together. The project is to not aim for a “w/hole” that memorialized the abject in totality, nor is it to separate off the different parts of the abject into “branches.” Instead, we must turn to the tangle of meanings that work together.

Questions:

What is the difference between what is “spiritual” and what is “felt”?

How are we “letting the being be” if the MEmorial is always our application of the disaster to our selves?

If the writing process can be compared to the digestive process, how do online spaces work to remove the “poop”?


photos @:


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http://static.howstuffworks.com/gif/toilet-new.jpg

Ulmer Week 2: The Projects Keep On Coming

In the Ulmer reading for this week we went through “The Call” and “Transversal.” Both of them interspersed the theories throughout with assignments which mean to help bring practical application to the reading. “The Call” had more to do with a new way of thinking about how we are hailed by the objects that we need to be “punctured” by. “Transveral” seemed to deal more with reconsidering the way we conceived of the relationship of our subjectivities (in whatever capacity that might be) to the images that they take in. There also seemed to be a greater emphasis on the postmodern (electrate) turn in “Transversal.”

The Call

One of the interesting moments in this chapter was the way that it dealt with a turn from images as a news source to images as an advertisement in the concept of the reasoneon. The reasoneon is a puncept from the words “reason” and “neon” in order to combine a hybrid between the things that we think about and the things that catch our attention. The specific example in the text is that it is not the neon itself that interests us, and that shapes us. Instead it is the shimmer of the neon light in a puddle that truly has an impact. This relates to the relationship between reason and advertising, where the images have reason included, but have only appropriated reason in order to accomplish other ends.

Speaking of impact, Ulmer sets up another concept is with Roland Barthes breakdown of images. One of these necessary concepts is the punctum, which is how the image pierces through cynicism and critical distance in order to impact the viewer. Ulmer also appropriates Barthes in the concept of the obtuse which is a third way of looking at an image that is indirect and more importantly involuntary. In taking an obtuse perspective to an image, especially one which reaches out to the punctum, images have the potential to “open wounds” in Ulmer’s definition. This connects the spectacle of tragedy to the social machine of public action, which can be a good thing. MEmorials are supposed to open up the space for those wounds.

The chapter is also critically connected to the idea of news, and Ulmer’s assignment for the chapter involves finding a news article that has “punctured” you and creating a website around the news story. As the chapter progresses, Ulmer goes into several examples of these kinds of news stories and ways to give a small memorial to them. There is another assignment that asks the reader to then try to turn the news story into a “scene.” This turn is fascinating in that it seeks to take a tragic even or circumstance (or maybe not tragic, but at least one that has a little punctum) and turns the event into a form of scene, which, for me, is most interesting in the case of the proposal for New York City’s homeless population. The example goes into some detail on the way that the homeless are created as a characteristic of space, specifically in conjunction with the tall skyscrapers. In the end the author, Krysztof Wodiczko, proposes making models of the homeless that are as tall as skyscrapers in order to accomplish a number of tasks.

Transversal

Though Ulmer starts this chapter at a place I understand, that news only a sub-genre of entertainment, the chapter heads in a direction that I don’t fully understand. He considers the simulacrum, which is the way images are expanded as a series of repetitions instead of as a set group of “wholes” in a category. Ulmer then goes on to demonstrate this simulacrum in the form of four different stories, each of them relating to a transgender moment, and the majority relating to the story of a gay man who robbed a bank in order to get money for a sex change operation. One of the articles is about the event itself, one is about a different incident with transgendered experience, and the other two took different lenses on the bankrobbery, the “place,” and the “person” respectively. The assignment then follows that the reader is supposed to compare these four textual moments and then expand on the move by performing the same motion with their example from the previous chapter.

Ulmer also puts a fair amount of emphasis on the relationship between images and identities, claiming that “the move to transverse [the real] has less to do with technology itself than a desire to transcend the body.” Though there was some important work going on here to talk about the relationship between images and identities, I couldn’t quite grasp where Ulmer was taking the idea. Also confusing were the two columns of words which seemed to correspond to a new vocabulary that reflected our appropriation of old categorical elements into new positions

Questions:

1)     

To what extent does Ulmers reference to the “optical unconscious” throw off a number of faulty visual associations, and it what way is he expanding those associations past purely the realm of the image?

2)      What does Ulmer mean in saying that news is “something that I already know or should know”?

 Why is that chapter named transversal? 

The Internet Accident and the Memorial

While these chapters by Ulmer were difficult to negotiate at times, one place to start might be the idea of the accident. Ulmer draws upon the notion that we are entering into a new age of communication which differs from either orality or literacy in important ways. Ulmer briefly outlines a few ways in which the age of literacy, in terms of the consideration of reading and writing texts, is coming to a close, and that the age of electracy, which is based on instant communication and visual communication, is coming into play. Ulmer’s goal in Electronic Monuments is to rethink our conceptions of education along these new lines of electracy.

One of the byproducts of dawn of electracy is the ability for there to be what Paul Virilio calls a “general accident” which is to say that the accident occurs immediately and across the entire world. This type of accident, then, makes the processes of democracy impossible, since the new modes of communication are leaving us unable to consider the idea of community in the same way. We then need to rethink the way that spaces and places interact, the way we compose and connect the different abstract machines in our environment. The idea of the abstract machine is especially pervasive throughout Ulmer’s consideration of electronic monuments, possibly because electracy involves a turn from the usual models of representation to a conception to the processes that underlie events and issues.

Toward this task, Ulmer points to an EmerAgency, which seems to be an electronic site for collecting and demonstrating the idea of deconsulting (which is the combination of deconstruction and consulting). This EmerAgency then creates MEmorials, which seem to be concerned with connecting elements of the individual with the group in order to enable a revisioning of the public sphere. MEmorials, then, are places for community to grow and respond to, and have a similar structure to what we normally consider in the building of a memorial in terms of what we often think of in terms of entertainment as well as the way that we consider tourism. MEmorials, then, build off the concepts that we already know, but often apply a new consideration of processes and technology with respect to the unconscious.

Examples of Disasters, Memorials, MEmorials

As a way of introducing the idea of these accidents/disasters Ulmer points to the idea of tourism. It starts by connecting disciplinarily to a move against tourism, in that once a person studies within a specific discipline they are given less reign to think outside of it. He connects the earliest theorists to tourists with the Greek term theoria, which connects our considerations of space, cognition, and ethics. The literate view, Ulmer contends, wants us to write in order to represent the sense of place as a certain kind of user interface that is problematic in that it separates the things being written about from the writing itself. When we are faced with an accident, we create memorials which in some ways try to operate on this same logic. We go to the memorial in order to mourn what happened on that day and thus get some kind of false catharsis from our false experience. What we are truly experiencing in those instances is the (w)hole of the accident, not the whole accident. The confusion, as usual, comes from our training in literacy.

One of the next places that Ulmer points us toward is the holograph as a way of making composite images which will not recede into being simply presentations of a happening. For Ulmer this is a way to consider the unconscious processes that push through the holographic composite by presenting an image that is both clear and unclear at once. It is this step into the unconscious which seems to get us beyond the problems of the individual to the problems of the collective as well, though his argument at that point is a bit more difficult to parse through.

Through the end of these chapters Ulmer also considers the relationship between sinkholes as a “karst topography” and human facial expression. This might be a connection between the idea of tourism as a consideration of geographic places and tourism as a consideration of expression. Indeed, one of the first examples of a MEmorial includes holographic faces which fade in and out of one another, much like we might think about a sinkhole. Through this description, Ulmer moves us farther away from what we typically think of as a memorial, since memorials are often thought of as constructed buildings in the memory of some great ideal or purpose. Ulmer, in pushing us toward the MEmorial, wants us to think of the concept of absence and the abject values as more important place for (de?)constructing, as (it seems) this will call greater attention to the “global” accident.          

Questions: 

So how does the process of constructing (?) a MEmorial help us to think about the idea of immediate accidents?

Why/how does Ulmer reference a "global America"?

Nadi and the Generalized World of Warcraft Experience

In the second part of the book Nardi goes into a deeper discussion of the ways that WoW exists within a larger framework of games, play, and activity. The chapters are filled with difficult moves, as it relates the WoW not only to larger frameworks, but to frameworks of knowledge that have little experience with placing games in the light of serious study. Nardi’s task is to make WoW seem both rational and muddy, tenable yet unattainable, so that we feel like this great expanse of culture and technology is readable and worth reading.

Activity Theory

The question that Nardi tries to answer is a relevant question for many people in their first encounter with games: why do people spend so much time playing games? What is the appeal? To this Nardi turns to activity theory, which is a way of talking about the way people are attracted to tasks and work at the until completion. The theoy is differentiates between conscious and unconscious processing of goals, as well as the way that people respond to the completion of those goals. At this point Nardi also brings in John Dewey’s definition of aesthetic experience to describe the way players not only want to complete the goals, but the way that gamers become emotionally satisfied through the process of playing.

In terms of this satisfaction, Nardi brings in multiple elements of Dewey’s aesthetic experience while continuing to relate it back to activity theory. One of these elements is that relationship between “means” and “ends” which is a complicated relationship when talking about activities. While some current theorists (or even outsiders to gaming) talk about the main goal of the gamers as the “ends” of the game in terms of the gaining a level or beating the game, Nardi points to the way that this model overlooks the experience that just “playing” gives the gamer. On the other hand, to put the main weight on “means” is to overlook the fact that players are playing toward a specific goal.  

Games as a New Medium

In the next Chapter Nardi focuses on how player’s relationship to the game, and specifically the MMORPG format, is different than other forms of media. On the one hand, it’s not quite like tv or film media, but on the other hand it isn’t quite like a sport, though there are strong correlations between these mediums.

The main point of much of this chapter is to talk about how WoW entails a specific type of performance. This is not the kind of performance where the actors are fully unaware of their performance (as might be considered with things like the way we are always already “performing”) but where the actors are aware that they are performing a certain identity the whole time. This ends up correlating with the way players aren’t simply watching what’s going on on the screen but are participating in the performance that’s taking place in the screen. In this careful delineation Nardi allows games to not only exist on a different level than other media, but to entail an automatic theatrical element implicit into stepping into the game in the first place. In this way gameplay encourages us into predisposed positions where everyone is “acting.”

In another way, Nardi talks about these performances as “honest” at some fundamental level. She claims that you can either level up or not, equip the gear or not, or perform the right actions or not, but either way those actions impinge on the situation in ways which cannot be “lied.” I’m not quite sure that this claim in particular is supposed to be a condition of the rules of the game, or of the way that the players then conceive of these rules, but the point felt tenuous at best.   

The Relationship Between Games as Work/Play

The last element that Nardi has to discuss is the relationship between WoW and theoretical notions of play. She employs a concept called the “magic circle” where we place certain duties/responsibilities within the notion of “work” and others in the concept of “play.” This distinction, Nardi attests, has a practical use, since there are some very real consequences to many of our “work” endeavors, including making an income, and the typical game does not satisfy that usual responsibility. But Nardi also discusses the points where games can become “work” and defines a number of spaces where the structures of work and play are less simple to identify. For example, in Korea there are professional gamers who make their living through gaming competitions and there are many points in the game called “gaming” and “farming” that are more like work than play. Some define these elements as a way for game companies to employ traditional power structures that “keep the gamer docile.” But Nardi is quick to consider alternatives, such as that this farming element is a central component to games in general in order to prolong gameplay and allow developers to work on further development.

Questions: What does Nardi mean when she says that the game performance makes play more “honest”? Is this honesty a function of the game conditions, of the players, or of games in general? In what ways does this concept of honesty problematize gameplay when acts are assumed to be concrete and simple when the actions themselves are always located with the complexities of a social matrix?

To what extent has your gameplay in WoW so far been considered as an aesthetic engagement? How would the early portion of adopting the game change if the initial game structures were built on an aesthetics of “bars”?

Considering Nardi’s definition of gamers as performers, what do we make of NPCs? To what extent do these in game entities exist in a coterminous space between “performer” and “environment” that is reminiscent of Turkle’s problems with robotic interaction?


images @
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Opening a Can of Nardi Up In Here

Nardi opens the book with a chapter to dispel some of the common misconceptions about WoW players, and then follows this with a chapter on her methodology. The majority of this information wasn’t particularly new to me, as I’ve taken a seminar on serious games already and I read this book for the Serious Games Colloquium last year. Still, I’ll run through some of the basic demystifications in the opening chapter, and then highlight a few pertinent aspects of Nardi’s methodology.

           One of the key characteristics that Nardi tries to dispel in the opening chapters is that people who play WoW, whether this relate to our sense of a “gamer” or a “true gamer” or a WoW player, is not a limited collection of individuals. Nardi highlights how people of a variety of age ranges play the game, and how one of her guilds is a “mature” guild, in that there is the built in ethos that the members might need to leave in the middle of the game to take care of their kids. Nardi also highlights how people who play WoW (and indeed a variety of games) come from many locations and backgrounds. Nardi considers all the lifestyles that inflect back on her experience playing WoW, and the way the game attracted such a diverse population. Data even shows that around fifteen to twenty percent of the players are female, which, while not extravagant, is a higher percentage than many people might think.

          Nardi also discusses the gameplay itself, which is strongly informed by the concept of “raiding.” Raiding is when a group of players go into a location together in order to kill some monster. A raid is both a noun for the activity of raiding as well as for the group of people performing that activity. These raids are sometimes performed with players that the user knows, but are also easily performed with strangers who need to accomplish the same task. Players can organize into “guilds” which are communities of varying sizes that put forth the same work ethic towards raiding. Some guilds require members to log a certain amount of time raiding, while others take the activity of raiding less seriously.

              The gameplay also reflects on the experience in terms of what users see and do in comparison to similar games. For example in terms of violence, Nardi characterizes WoW as an environment that deals with the violence in an abstract way. The monsters all look disgusting and non-human (even non-animal) in order to help the play disassociate this violence with actual violence. There is also not a great deal of blood and gore in WoW despite the amount of monsters that must be “slain.” This helps Nardi to argue for how WoW is a more inviting game environment than the typical gory first person shooter.

             On a similar note, Nardi briefly addresses the issue of griefing that goes on within the game (though she doesn’t specifically call it that). On many servers, players can kill each other, which leads to questionable game ethics. For instance the practice of “ganking” is when a much stronger player kills a weak player, waits for them to revive, and then kills their ghost before the player can recover their things. This can continue infinitely, and the only solution seems to be to have a guild that comes in to kill the “ganker.” Even outside this practice, however, there are other modes of problematic gameplay. Players are able to log out if a slain monster does not drop the desired items. Players are given this freedom within the codes of the game.

              In terms of methodology, Nardi performs a fairly standard ethnography, which is where the observer collects data about a community via interviews, observations, and documents. Nardi compares this ethnography to others that she has experienced where she traveled with her husband, and remarks with interest about how she was similarly enveloped into the world without going terribly far from home or spending a considerable amount of money. The strane/interesting moment, however, is that Nardi does not consider her actions within the game to have affected the play at all. She did not tell the other players that she was a researcher as she played, as her logic suggests that because she did not stick out, she did not change the gameplay any more than if she had just been another player. So while, in other games, the community has had an active role in the discussion, here it almost seems like her observations are the main evidence. And while most of the research took place through her computer in the United States, Nardi’s research also covers how the game is received in China, as she traveled there with some graduate students to find out more about the culture surrounding WoW.

 Questions:

To what extent does the presence of the researcher, both in the subjectivity of Nardi and in the environment that she studied, force us into more discussion about the participant-observer model than Nardi gives credit?

In what ways might we think about calling WoW an “open world” game as a more inclusive term than as a mmorpg, as the latter connotes a level of communal activity that isn’t all together necessary in other games where the very presence of “being in the world” sets off a set of activities that one might not attempt in a first person shooter?

In what ways does voice chat connect us to technology and each other in different ways than text based communication? The answer to this question leads us to connect the themes of Turkle with Nardi’s description of the way voice chat “gives away” certain qualities of a person’s identity while muddling others.  

Images From:

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgvdIr9P8gHdo0xxH-ekXGGr9BYAEfd97nGbLNGTmjKTnyYhG35hnN2bWyyt3iYyJ72xe15ELYEuI1w2nDTVx8eBJ9BWL6pFutV-bkGKgn3Qc9OIdpZXrB-5dIDjF7BDJsfsPg8Eom7cbI/s1600/funny-world-of-warcraft-pictures.jpg

http://gethacks.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/max_lvl_891.jpg

http://images.icanhascheezburger.com/completestore/2009/3/22/128822339577848834.jpg

As Time With Turkle Comes To An End

In the last chapters of Alone Together, Turkle continues the conversation about our relationship to teachnology in an interesting way, as she transitions away from criticism of robots, and towards criticism of media technologies. In this turn, Turkle interestingly relates the two together in that machines that we tended to also tended to us, in that the more people took care of the robots, the more that they felt like the robot filled a void in their lives. In a similar way, Turkle talks about social media as something that we are forced to “take care” of, and that in taking care of it, it seems to take care of us.

“Taking Care” of our technology

Turkle starts with talking about how our media becomes something that we have to “tend” in a similar way to how we would tend to a pet, except that tending the Net means tending our very identites. There are several stories from adolescents about how they have to manage their profiles in order to seem a certain way, and how the adolescents have to learn to negotiate stressful decisions about what to post on their pages. This type of personality management is, in Turkle’s opinion, overwhelming. This also goes for not only web media in terms of text messaging, where the constancy of being available to be messaged further forces us to “tend” the media. To some extent this was a comment that applied to radio, television, and the ubiquity of the mobile phone, but Turkle points out how it isn’t so much how the technology has changed, but how the social regulations have changed with the technology. Whether someone is in a meeting, or in a conversation, or what have you, the prevalence of texting has forced an expectation that the recipient will answer quickly.

As Turkle further interrogates this connection to texting technology, she points to more stories of teens and the negative repercussions of connectivity. There are many stories about what teens expect out of their conversations, which attempt to limit the excessiveness of conversation by converting sound and expression into typed letters. There were interesting stories about how teens try to send the right message with their texts. Their image as the “in” crowd, or being sexually sophisticated come from their texts, texts that can be sent from other people, that can be copy pasted off the Net. Part of the worry here is back to a thread of worry about authenticity and identity. How do these young kids know if the person talking to them is really the one that thought up the text?

Identity Ambiguity

Stemming from this worry about online identity, Turkle highlights the way teens shrug off the harmful effects of connectivity. In terms of identity, there is some trouble to the way new users to technology don’t care if the people they talk to online are “real.” This means real in terms of being who they say they are, what they say they feel, or even (as we saw in the section about robots) if they’re actually real at all. Teens seem to shrug off the responsibility to care about who actually is on the other side of the screen, as they experience the malleable indetity politics from their own seat. For example one girl has a completely different identity on an Italian chat site, where she can speak more promiscuously and post more risqué pictures. Turkle then talks about a how some people see these alternate spaces for identity as completely free, while ignoring the fact that the users become emotionally invested in these identities. For Turkle, identity play in itself isn’t dangerous, but it is dangerous to think that there are no consequences or connections that are made when we play with identity.

Ambivalence to Privacy

Another element that Turkle finds particularly problematic is how privacy is treated by the social media faithful. Not only adolescents, but even major players in industry are finding fewer and fewer reasons to include features that enable the privacy of their users, and even then it’s almost as if it is a privilege, and not a right. Many seem to think that their privacy is just something taken for granted, or that there will be an acceptance for inappropriate material that surfaces later in their lives. In the end these new users not only know that their posts are read, but expect that their posts will be read. Some even go so far as to claim that this loss of privacy is a good thing, as “we shouldn’t have anything to hide.” But in the end the breakdown of attention to privacy brings up important questions about our relationship to our words. If our Facebook walls are going to be up forever, then what should we be writing about? Should we be thinking about the way a wall post today will change the future 20 years down the line? In the end, Turkle has few answers, other than to point to our ability to be alone with ourselves, to disconnect on occasion. But these references to Thoreau speak poorly to a generation raised on Pokémon, so that while this message might work to persuade those that are already critical, it seems inconsiderate of how to speak to the actual mass of networked users. 


Questions: 
1. This book uses a multitude of interviews with adolescents, but uses those interviews to reference cultural emblems (Cyrano for example) that have little connection with these groups. Understanding that this is an academic text aimed primarily at the field of media scholarship, how does this book serve more to reinforce the mindset of anxious parents than to change the mindset of adolescents?
2. Turkle describes a dismal future for those that "grow up tethered," in what ways is this future a different argument than one's we have heard before against media, and in what ways is it another generalized concern for a younger generation that we do not have the tools to evaluate?
3. In what ways does Turkle's status as a psychoanalyst come to bear on the book in both fruitful and problematic ways?


Photos Via:
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http://thumbs.dreamstime.com/thumblarge_460/1260788229FnvmgH.jpg

Alone Together or Alone/Together (?)

In the first few chapters of Alone Together, Turkle invites us to think about robots, specifically what robots do to disrupt the way we see things such as subjectivity, emotion, and love.

The very first chapter begins by talking about robots as companions, rooted in a conversation that Turkle had with a reporter from Scientific American in which the reporter accused Turkle of maligned views toward same sex marriage because of her criticism that people should not be allowed to marry robots. The reporter claimed that Turkle wasn’t giving Turkle the same rights as humans, and that prejudice about one group necessarily transferred to other groups. Angered by this moment, Turkle sets out to write about our relationship to technology and the loss of the “authenticity” of things. This will eventually relate to our exchanges with computers in communication, but Turkle takes the first half of the book to talk about our relationship with robots.

                Authenticity, as a concept, seems to be Turkle’s biggest concern. Early on in the first half of the book, Turkle talks about the difference between toys and robots, or maybe more precisely the conflation of the two. While children have always used toys, some even having anthropomorphic tendencies, robots ability to react and to move and, seemingly, to learn, changes the whole experience. Both older generations and kids purchase robots as a toy/companion, but it often merges into just being a companion. Part of the problem, then, is that these virtual pets don’t die. The pets then give the owner the illusion of responsibility. A person can take care of these toys, but they can also turn them off, walk away.

                But the will to think about these robots as having underlying human characteristics isn’t just an element that has to deal with robots, but, it seems, has to do with language itself. Turkle cites a famous computer interaction program called ERICA. When people would write into the program, it was only a matter of time until the person started to share very personal information about themselves looking for the computer to care. It is in this “caring” that Turkle harps on, because the computer doesn’t actually have a sense of empathy, and she feels we are being enchanted in order to be deceived. The deception of care might lead us to believe that we’re having social lives, but then will keep us from having to think about what it “really” means to care as a communicative act between two humans.

                Later on in the section, Turkle discusses the many ways that we create an “I and thou,” which seems to be a way of saying that the robot has personal characteristics. Sometimes this is discussed as the way children like to make up for the robot’s inadequacies. Seeing that the robot was having a speaking malfunction, or if a limb wasn’t working, people would still try to “care” for the robot in ways that considered the robot as “hurt” or “sick.” When the robot couldn’t talk, some children tried to use sign language to talk to the robot. At other times, children would take offense to the robot’s inefficiencies, to the point where the researchers had to consider what they should do if the robot’s inabilities had profound negative effects on the children.

                One of the strongest chapters in the book so far was the one on “Communion” where a performance artist tried to perform the moves of the robot in order to understand it’s mindset and actions. She studied the robot and the trainer, and then put on a performance where she made those movements, and then talked to Turkle about her experiences. In order to inhabit the mindset of the robot, the performance artist had to give the movements an emotional background. Sometimes this related to a “love” for the operator, and other times it was just a mood behind the movement. In the end, Turkle devolves to a discussion of how our only way to think about movement might be in consideration of emotion, with emotion being a factor that we can’t just get away from.

                In another great part of the chapter, a researcher argues with Turkle’s concept that machine emotions are inauthentic while human emotions are authentic. In reality, we can’t know when a person is being genuine to us or just putting on a performance, we can only take it in stride and accept that we are seeing some kind of emotion. This is similar then, to robots, where we believe that the emotion is not authentic (we don’t think the machine can feel) but at the same time we really can’t know. Turkle ends the chapter out of this argument by saying that it’s not so much that we should privilege one over the other, but we should still consider the consequences of the change and the result of the shift. 


Questions: 


What does Turkle's argument have to do for our considerations of subjectivity? This is to say, how do we know that the emotions of others are authentic? Do we have any better proof that robots are not authentic? 


Does everything that enchants also deceive? What is the full implication of this statement, and how do we reconcile it beyond just robots and technology? 


In what ways do we project emotional capacity onto more than just robots or technology, but onto all kinds of trivialized areas of our lives?