For this assignment, we were to read two readings and comment on three passages from them. The readings were:

1. Culture + Technology – Jennifer Daryl Slack & Macgregor Wise
2. Values and Valuing – Adapted from Carl Mitcham, ed., Encyclopedia of Science, Technology, and Ethics

The first passage is the following:

We are persuaded by progress because we are persuaded by the logic (logos) of the argument that it is better to be efficient, rational, and scientific. We are also persuaded by the logic and ethic (ethos) of the argument of evolution (we trust science and scientists) that progress is inevitable, And finally. we are persuaded by the deeply emotional argument (pathos) of the sublime; persuaded by our own feelings of fear, awe, and expectation.

What I am interested in within this passage has little to do with logos and ethos and most to do with pathos or the sublime. I feel as though humans inherently have addictive personalities. I think that this is an addiction to the sublime. At a point in time, we changed from a species of hunter / gatherers (which metaphorically, all other species on earth are) to a species that would take control our their destiny through creation. As creators it is seen that we were taking the role of god (whatever your interpretation of that is), and god is something that has never truly been understood (if it were, I don’t believe that there would be religious wars). Thus, there is a sense of fear in that we have never actually understood the repercussions of our creative mind.

Despite the fear associated with creative developments, and despite the reasoning behind them (survival, utopia, progress) we have always maintained a tendency to create. I feel as though this tendency is an addiction. As if the apple on the tree of knowledge was laced with something that we cannot let go of, and if it will lead us to the demise of humanity, we will continue to create until that time. Not that it will, but I just feel as though our addiction is that strong.

I don’t feel as though this addiction should be seen as a negative aspect of humanity. I also don’t feel that all people are addicted in the same way. The things that we make can substitute the feelings of sublime, for example cigarettes give a feeling of fear (the may harm us), awe (they enhance a moment by altering your sensory perception of that moment), and expectation (the result of smoking may be harmful, but it may not, you won’t know until it does or you die). Thus, people feel vicariously sublime through the objects that we create.

I would agree that the persuasion of progress in it’s current state is as Slack & Wise put it, but I feel as though the sublime is stronger than we are lead to believe. The logos and ethos may change, but the pathos will not.

Second:

Langdon Winner explains that technological determinism is a belief that depends on two hypotheses:

1. that belief that the technical base of a society is the fundamental condition affecting all patterns of social existence and
2. that belief that technological change is the single most important source of change in society.

1. Our only true understanding of anything is through a moment. Anything beyond the current moment is modelled though our perception or our memory. The moment is a multiplication of sensory experience, pragmatic rationalization, and historical referencing. At no point in time have we been able to recreate this experience for a moment that is not the current one. Thus, we don’t truly understand the past.
2. History is communicated through an event based narrative. It reinforces the notion of linear causality, and though we can rationalize it pragmatically, we cannot understand it. We can make attempts to re-create it so that we have have better visual references to make sense of it, but we still cannot experience it.
3. The further that you move away from the current moment, the further or more different the experience would be. Thus, the farther back in time that we think about, the less we can understand.
4. Our social existence has been documented upon the technical base of society, beyond that even our rational is speculation about how that moment would feel.

Third:

If technology is conceived as a matter of control and dependence, of Master and Slave, it is set apart from human culture, treated as autonomous, then either blamed or praised. Either we have control over technology, or it has control over us; the effects in either case can be conceived as either worthy of praise or blame.

Throughout history, I really wonder if this conundrum has been so prevalent as it is now. When new tools were more explicitly beneficial, did people still blame them? For example, when the carriage was invented and people discovered that they could carry much more and much faster than ever before, did they dispute it and say that they liked walking with a heavy load? Did they blame it for taking away the pace that they were so used to or was it embraced as a welcome alternative to the ways that they were used to?

To me, it seems that this invention would be hard to blame, but it is hard for me to understand their experience. But, on the chance that the notion of blame did not always exist, I wonder if it something that is increasing. The blame and praise of our inventions is possibly an artifact of the intent that is put into them. For many reasons, we make things for betterment, but for many other reasons we make them for other reasons. The other reasons often have more to do with ego and self than betterment of their environment. I sure hope that we can achieve a level of culture that create things only for betterment, and in which the things that we create are considerate to every aspect of their environment.

That sounds like a long road, and I am sure it won’t be bricked with gold.

I want to make sure that the time I spend reading other people’s ideas is well spent. How do I make sure of this? Well, the one thing that I have, and that no one can take away from me, is AGENCY. If I do not act on new ideas that enter my mind, I deny my own humanity. The purpose of being human is to act, to make small changes in our collective history of the Earth.

What is ACTION? It can be something simple that you never show someone else. Draw a doodly picture, hum a made up song. But the most powerful actions are those that communicate ideas to other human beings, with the potential to change the way someone thinks.

I confess that I am afraid of laying my mind out in the open. I even have trouble making up my own mind on issues. It’s a result of being an extreme relativist, that every point of view can change given a different vantage point. But this is the heart of ACTION: collect the evidence, make up your mind, take a stance, and make it happen! Have the confidence to stand up behind an idea, then take the action to advance it. Evolution is life. Stasis is death. You have been given the power to act. Embrace ACTION.

What inspires you to take action?

It was probably two years ago that I stumbled across Folkert Gorter. I found him because I liked the work that he did, but I bookmarked his site for another reason. One of the sites in his body of work was named SpaceCollective. I clicked on the link and found a glowing orb with the words “Coming Soon”. When I provoked the orb with my mouse it subtly changed to reveal a log in form. I thought that this was quite peculiar.

It is not that often that you find something on the internet that has been created (or partially created) by a very talented professional, with a very distinguishable, thought provoking name, and a log in form with no explanation. I even asked Google, but no help. There have been a few times in the past two years that I have re-visited the orb, checking to see if there was any progress. But all visit came up to be a disappointment. The SpaceCollective had disappointed me, that is, until today.

Following a link from Smashing Magazine, I once again was acquainted with the SpaceCollective, only this time no to be disappointed:

SpaceCollective. Where forward thinking terrestrials exchange ideas and information about the state of the species, their planet and the universe, living the lives of science fiction today.

Check it out and let us know what you think.

Nobody’s perfect. It’s not that they don’t want to be, but everybody has flaws. Flaws that, if pointed out, can help to improve the desired areas and create a better experience for everybody. What better way to hear about the things that could be improved than from the people that you interact with. That is what Get Satisfaction is all about.

Get Satisfaction is a platform for customers to give feedback to the businesses that they use. The purpose is to make it easy for customers to report their ideas, complaints, errors, or even discussions about a business. The report can in turn create a community around the concern that will raise awareness and possibly come across a solution. There are a few great benefits to this whole idea:

1. It breaks away from companies controlling their own customer service department in which the method to submit a complaint is probably a complaint in itself.
2. It puts the issues about a company in the open. When something is filed about a business, the business can’t hide the issue and pretend that it isn’t there. With the issues in the open even people who aren’t submitting a complaint or maybe potential customers will get an impression of the company not only by the issue itself, but also the way the company deals with the issue.
3. The posts are easily shareable, so that if you use facebook, digg, twitter, de.licio.us, or other socially driven sites, you can easily share your issue with the communities that you are already involved in.
4. Most importantly, communities of people are the agents of change. Large numbers of people agreeing on one thing will force businesses and people in control to change their ways.

http://cnrlw.muxtape.com/

I’m not sure about you, but I spend much of my day in front of a computer. For most of the day I like to listen to music. When I can find new music, I get extra inspired. That is why I was so excited when I first heard about muxtape. Hopefully you aren’t just hearing about it for the first time right now and you have some experience with it. In short, it is the revival of the mixtape. As burning CD’s almost seems to be becoming a thing of the past, muxtape is a platform for people to be inspired by a limited selection of songs in a particular order.

One of the interesting features of muxtape is its lack of features. The exploration of the music is either based on randomness or others peoples favorites. They have their own favoring system but I am quite curious about when other sites will start dedicating themselves to sharing muxtapes. For now, I am not aware of any. What I am aware of is intwo.ca, and thus I ask you to share your muxtape or your favorite muxtapes on this page. What better way to filter through a bunch of information than to share with people that read the same articles as you.

Please share! :]

Sometimes things are moving so fast that it is hard to keep up to all of the change. We are rapidly finding new ways to do things and not always considering the consequences. This animated short makes a great commentary on humans’ interaction with their environments and how they inflict change on the things around them. It was nominated for an academy award in 2003 and is a great 8 mins.

Check it out and let us know what you think.

[Video after the jump]

[Thanks Ty]

One of the biggest problems with intellectual thought is that it more often than not stays within intellectual circles. Alan Watts, has been attempting to change that by using the internet, producing podcasts, audio files, and videos. Yesterday, I came across a set of animations that were produced by Trey Parker and Matt Stone (the creators of South Park) that narrate Watts’ recordings. The video’s have a light a whimsical feel, and most certainly take the discussion out from the intellectual circles and into the hands of everyone else.

Video’s are after the jump.

Life and Music

Prickles and Goo

Appling

As a science, creating robotics that are self aware is a field that is on the verge of creating artificial intelligence. Hod Lipson has a great TED talk in which he introduces two robotic experiments that touch on self awareness and evolution. One is a four legged machine that becomes self aware and teaches itself to walk. It is a fascinating and somewhat scary thought that we can create machines that have an understanding of a goal and not only have the means to reach the goal, but have the means to teach themselves to reach the goal.

As an art, this inherent knowledge within the robot can create a poetry that cannot be recreated with inanimate objects. The Robotic Chair by Max Dean, Raffaello D’Andrea, and Matt Donovan is a great piece of work in which the chair falls apart and pieces itself back together. The strong metaphor relies heavily on the self awareness of the object.

As an object, the chair has been a constant and trustworthy partner in the history of civil society. We depend on the chair to support our bodies as we depend upon the earth beneath our feet. The Robotic Chair stands in for the individual and a society over the course of a lifetime – falling apart, falling down, gathering oneself together, picking oneself up, again and again. The Robotic Chair articulately and concisely reminds us on a grand scale that there is magic – that there is hope.

Despite the potentially scary outcome of science (in the wrong hands) taking artistic ideas to create a apocalyptic science fiction thriller, this robotic chair reminds us that we are good at adapting to unfortunate situations and whatever bad situations we create, we have the means to piece ourselves back together.

Check out the video on their website as it is much more dramatic.

Every day, the millions of people that are connected to the internet confess their feelings and emotions to an unknown audience. It provides a forum where you can feel as though you are talking to no one yet speak your emotions like you could be heard by everyone. In 2006, Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar created We Feel Fine, an interactive exploration of peoples feelings through blog posts. The application filters the plethora of information that is posted on blogs and shows you real time posts that relate to a specified emotion. It then gives different methods to visually search and sort through that information.

Yesterday I came across twistori(by Amy Hoy and Thomas Fuchs). Drawing on the same idea as We Feel Fine, twistori searches twitter posts and filters them by the emotion written in the post. The interface is pretty, and it is interesting to watch what people are saying for a while, but I find that the project lacks meaning. I maybe shouldn’t say that, I guess what I mean, is that I would like more meaning out of it.

The concept of using a visual, interactive interface to sort and communicate large amounts of data is far from new. As we all seem to be some sort of visual learners, visual representations of information are one of the most effective ways to communicate complex data. Using this method of communication design to enhance social interaction and to connect people or groups of people is a much less explored field. In both of these projects, I feel like the application is allowing you to interact with the data in a way to bring you closer to an individual, yet at the same time acts as a wall between you and the person from actually interacting. This is quite possibly the intent of the authors, but I would find it very interesting if a project used this type of visually represented data to enhance social interaction.

What do you think? 

The price of rice is rising, and this is bad news for near half of the world’s population who depend on it for their daily fill. Earlier this year, a wave of pests and disease swept across Vietnam’s rice fields, decimating crops and causing several rice producing countries to limit their export in order to secure their domestic stock. The world seems to teetering on the brink of a global food crisis, in times where population explosion demands more than ever from the agricultural industrial machine.

And an industry it is. In the 1960’s, the US-funded “Green Revolution” brought monocultural practices to Asia and Latin America, introducing farming practices that focus on a few, chemical fertilizer-reliant crops, optimized for yield, not nutritional value or suitability to local conditions. Monoculture production promised to do for food production what the Model T had done for auto production, and at first glance it worked, the soil boosted by oil-based fertilizer.

But now we are starting to see what loss of diversity, and introduction of plant varieties poorly suited to local conditions, really mean for crop resilience. In naturally evolved ecosystems, diversity provides a buffer mechanism. In the event of a disaster, this buffer provides a chance of survival for at least some species, that will continue living to form the base of a new stable ecosystem. Monoculture, by definition, is poorly suited to rapidly changing conditions. As we can see from Vietnam, a combination of a virus and a rapidly spreading pest (whose natural enemies probably were gone because of human interference), caused devastating damage to an entire country’s crops.

The Georgia Straight has an in-depth article on Monoculture practices and the food crisis, and how soil productivity and yield can actually be improved using more traditional, sustainable farming practices. I highly recommend it. It also mentions the recently opened Global Seed Vault in the northern island of Svalbard (Norway), care of the Global Crop Diversity Trust (FAO, UN). On the one hand, it means the UN are acknowledging the importance of global crop diversity. On the other hand, the vault has received sizable donations from Syngenta and DuPont, biotech seed giants that have a track record of locking seeds in patents. They have played a big role in the Monoculture industry, and are completely invested in the status quo, so what are their intentions?

[via straight.com, dn.se (Swedish)]