Litorality

This article is largely about an attack that caused Mr. Miele's blindness, but the brief mention of the work he does now sounds really interesting. 

Some interesting work in Braille and other accessibility work for visually impaired computer users. "Writing?" I don't know. I think though it fits into writing for social change.

He has helped develop tactile-Braille maps of every station of the Bay Area Rapid Transit system, exquisite things with raised lines of plastic and Braille labels. They elegantly lay out information that can be heard by using an audio smart pen.

I'd like to continue to ask how digital spaces extend the academic and social justice/ civic engagement efforts of members of university communities, while continuing to pay attention to the ways that work/life/recreation merge in our use of things like mapping technologies and other virtual spaces.

Andy Clark and David Chalmers' "The Extended Mind" has come up in conversations recently when talking about my project, and I'd like to spend some time thinking through ideas around the Extended Mind Thesis. 

However, more practically I think some of the following readings would be more immediately helpful to thinking about students' choices of where, when and how to extend the classroom: 

Kittilson and Dalton, Virtual Civil Society: The New Frontier of Social Capital?

Diehl, Grabill, Hart-Davidson "Grassroots: Supporting the Knowledge Work of Everyday Life"

and the longer Grabill book (as suggested also by Emily, thanks!) Writing Community Change 

"How do you teach the idea of “fair use” to an algorithm?"

The Muppets: "Man or Muppet" Music Video (by MuppetsStudio)

The Million Muppet March-- Are muppets alive enough?

Turkle, Alone Together

"When children ask, 'Don't we have people for these jobs?' they remind us that our allocation of resources is a social choice" (Turkle 108)

I have a number of thoughts on this chapter that deals with the elderly and elder care.

One woman in touch with Turkle wrote her an email that said "if..robots are designed to compliment humans and not replace them, then I am all for it" (qtd. in Turkle 122).

Imagine that you have an elderly relative with a debilitating and terminal organ failure. Imagine that that organ failure results in neurological dysfunction (to be specific: liver failure slowly poisons the brain. It has a specific name: hepatic encephalopathy).  There is a medicine that lessens this, but it results for many patients in severe and sudden incontinence. 

A human caretaker, given a choice between a lucid but very messy patient and a very ill and cognitively non-functioning patient might choose the latter. To many of us who consider people to be more "there" when they are cognitively functioning, this is a tragic decision, but one that you could hardly blame the caretaker for, especially if they were an exhausted family member doing this work on top of many other responsibilities.

This seems to be a case where a robot could provide better care AND the patient and family would all be better off. 

I've also spent significant time with a very close relative suffering from severe dementia. But I remember one time noticing a connection in the seemingly nonsensical series of words she uttered; I particularly remember her talking about time, then touching her face. Because the connection was so obvious--a watch has a face, a person has a face, therefore face-time are related, I, for a moment, understood the logic of dementia. What if programs could sort through patterns of relationships in such a way as to make sense of--or understand the connections being made--by a person suffering from dementia? 

In her conclusion to this chapter, "Do Robots Cure Conscience," Turkle seems very worried. In rethinking this, I believe Turkle is arguing that being a person is becoming too easy, and that we're letting robots function as an excuse for being basically lazy moral beings. She writes: 

Programs become opaque when we are at our computers, most of us only deal with surfaces. We summon screen icons to act as agents. We are pleased to lose track of the mechanisms behind them and take them 'at interface value.' But as we summon them to life, our programs come to seem almost companions. Now 'almost' has almost left the equation. Online agents and sociable robots are explicitly designed to convince us that they are adequate companions" (124)

I think, ultimately, Turkle is dealing with two different problems. One, she doesn't think robots are/can be/ are the right kind of moral, or maybe not moral, but she's worried that we are so ready to see their as performing functions as something more--as a human-like existence. But robots are exactly as moral as we make them. They will follow their program or command as entered. 

Turkle's second problem, and the one I tried to highlight with the first quote at the beginning, is human behavior and values. She's worried about that with abusive kids that beat MyRealBabies and cut up furbies into 18 pieces, and she's worried about it with Edna who choses the RealBaby over her real greatgrandbaby, and she's worried about it with America and our desire to leave behind our elderly. But that's not a robot problem. 

Time and Hyper reading exercise

I want to connect the idea of time that Hayles discusses in the early part of the book to some of the big ideas we've discussed to date in the class. 

How do the changes in time/space brought by digital objects change participatory culture? I saw a tweet today that said "Cool thing about Twitter and Facebook is that you can come up with a clever response two hours later, and still be thought witty."

So is time really expanded in the way Hayles says it is when it comes to social media?

If social literacy is gained through participating in media and reading it in the right(?) ways can we hold the water in the bowl--keep the potential of time in limbo--until we are ready to be witty? Or important, or relevant, or timely?

I am thinking of this particularly as one person noted that ha, ha, this election year's October surprise is Climate Change via Hurricane/Frankenstorm Sandy 

How does participation change when time is reconfigured (and how is time reconfigured)?

I was interested in Hayles' claim that digital humanities work could be a reservoir of possibilities that may be actualized as the technological milieu progresses and as technical objects proliferate, exploring ways to achieve greater integration (120).