Film 1: A Day Made of Glass 2. (5:58)
Film 2: Productivity Future Vision (6:17)
Assignment:
These are two video advertisements - one from Corning, and one from Microsoft - setting out these companies’ visions of how their products will evolve and be used in the future. In both cases, the companies position their information technologies as completely integrated with daily life. Questions you might try to answer in the discussion boards, on Twitter, or in the form of an image are:
- how is education being visualised here? what is being learned and taught?
- what is the nature of communication in these future worlds?
- are these utopian or a dystopian visions to you? In what way(s)?
My impressions
The Corning commercial is partially utopian. In one way it is an ideal world. Always information instantly within a touchable distance available, transferrable to others without wires. But do people still talk with each other? Do they get dirty in the forrest if everything is just augmented reality? Why even go to school in the same way as today, while everyone could create their own interactive learning in the way they enjoyed most? Or do we need to share our learning experiences in the classroom or together with augmented reality in the parc?
The Microsoft advertisement I see also as an Utopian worldview. Technology is seen as convenient, perfect with perfect service. Everything is effortless integrated, people can communicate with each other from everywhere integrated in their own virtual worlds. But is it also still personal? In both cases the technology is the key. While in my utopian world people will still be the key and technology only the tool that could enable the change through the people using it. But will this be inclusive for everyone or only for technology savies? How easy will it be to adapt to this future for everyone? Or is everyone born from now a digital native at birth? On the other hand the future shown in both videos does not look to far away if you look at the cars and metros shown in the video!
Film 3: Sight (7:50)
Assignment:
Sight explores how the ubiquity of data and the increasingly blurry line between the digital and the material might play out in the sphere of human relationships. The focus on the emerging social and educational use of game-based ‘badging’ is particularly interesting. What is going on here, and how do you interpret the ending? How does this vision align and contrast with the ones in the first two films?
My impressions
This is a really disturbing future where everything really is one big game programmed outside your own control. Clearly dystopian. For me this is a much more scary world vision that the more utopian worlds of the earlier videos. This movie goes much further in terms of mind fucking / manipulation of your brains that the other two.
Film 4: Charlie 13 (14:20)
Assignment:
In this film, a young boy is about to reach the age where, in his society, he will be permanently ‘tagged’ by having a tracking device implanted in his body. A futuristic angle on a ‘coming of age’ story, the boy has to choose whether to submit to the requirements of his society, or seek a different life. By suggesting a degree of personal autonomy, the film diverges considerably from some of last week’s (new media, bendito machine III). To what extent does Charlie 13 represent a hopeful or a bleak future? How you answer this may depend on whether you see Charlie, and the resistance he represents, as a genuine alternative to the social and technological forces at work in this future society.
My impressions
Charlie's choice makes the future hopeful: there still is a choice to make. Conformatism or the rebellion or adventure of youth? An easy choice to make! The choice for freedom and curiosity instead of the choice for the known and traced.
Reading: Johnston, R (2009) Salvation or destruction: metaphors of the internet. First Monday, 14(4). http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2370/2158
Assignment:
Johnston draws from the key work of Lakoff and Johnson to highlight the important work that metaphors do in shaping our thinking. She identifies two broad categories of metaphors drawn from the titles of editorials about the internet in late 2008 - those that take a utopian perspective (salvation - transformative and revolutionary) and those that are dystopian (destruction - attacking and supplanting). Last week we explored how to identify and consider determinist positions about digital cultures and e-learning. Noticing the sorts of metaphors that are used to draw comparisons between the unfamiliar and the familiar, or the abstract and the concrete, can be another very useful way of understanding the assumptions that people are making about e- learning (the ‘native’ and the ‘immigrant’, for example). In the next ‘perspectives’ section, we will look at some MOOC-related articles, and this will be a great opportunity to do a bit of metaphor analysis of your own. What examples of both ‘salvation’ and ‘destruction’ metaphors can you find in these, or other MOOC reports and editorials? How does Shirky’s metaphor of the MP3, for example, create a certain kind of story around the MOOC?
My impressions
A summary of the article shown in the metaphor of a moving bus
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