Week 1 summary
This week I’ve been reflecting on a few ideas, and while thinking about things (particularly films) that pertained to these ideas, also about what does and doesn’t qualify as ‘digital culture’.
Especially when looking at film, I was interested in the prevalence of dystopian views of technology in general, and in particular technologies that had embedded themselves into everyday life to some extent or other. As most of this week’s assigned viewing emphasised, this is particularly focussed on new technologies, real or imagined (i.e. telephones, printing presses, cars, etc. don’t take over the world) and an individual’s (or small group’s) experiences of them going wrong (a kind of micro-dystopia, which may or may not eventually spread)…with the exception of Dr Strangelove, of course. But even in stories where the humans have been taken over by machines (or via the use of machines), one person is often singled out (e.g. Capt. Mandrake in Dr Strangelove, Neo in The Matrix , Del in I, Robot or–ahem–Lewis in Meet the Robinsons fighting a very bad hat with a time machine).
This seems to connect in some way to the individual-group segmentation found in discourse about Web 2.0. The promise of ‘personalisation‘ versus the potential of groups interacting, connecting, expanding each other’s horizons… The purpose of an individual in the narratives above is perhaps not so much a statement about ‘the way things are’ in itself, but rather the way we might experience things in tech-mediated situations…
I often wonder about the relative dominance of dystopian views too Candace. I like what Neil Badmington says about this in his book ‘Posthumanism’ – he suggests that posthumanism emerged through the coming together of ‘theory and mass culture’. Both were concerned with the end of human dominance. In productions such as War of the Worlds, The Blob, and Invasion of the Body Snatchers, he says, we consistently see ‘Man’ at risk from ‘an inhuman other: “his” position at the centre of things’ being placed in question. But humanity is almost always ultimately triumphant over the alien Other in popular culture – so despite the dominance of the dystopian vision, the ‘threat’ to humanity is generally placed within limits. Badmington’s view was that this was a response to the rise of ‘anti-humanist’ theory – ‘Humanism was in trouble: Hollywood knew this but took refuge in denial’. An interesting view, even if you don’t agree!
I believe that the need to create objects that bring us to the greater reality possible like in the movie Artificial Intelligence has become an obsession. This leads us to think about how close is this science fiction into our reality.