Meeting the Universe Halfway

What public figure do you disagree with the most? There are certain public figures and political leaders I struggle to agree with, especially when their decisions affect education, technology, the arts, and the future opportunities available to students. As someone who has spent years teaching technology and helping students navigate the digital world, this issue is deeply personal to me. I…

The video starts with bold red letters blaring: “2016 Democrat Primary Voter Fraud CAUGHT ON TAPE.” A series of blurry security footage follows, showing blatant instances of ballot stuffing. The only problem: The clips actually depict voter fraud in Russia. A quick Google search would have easily revealed the dubious source of the video, along with news articles debunking its claims. But when researchers from Stanford studying young people’s media literacy — the ability to accurately evaluate information in the wilds of mass media — showed the video to 3,446 high school students, only three succeeded in identifying the Russian connection. “There is this myth of the digital native, that because some people have grown up with digital devices, they are well equipped to make sense of the information that those devices provide,” says Joel Breakstone, who led the 2021 study. “The results were sobering.” It’s a startling reality about Gen Z, backed up by multiple studies and what we can all see for ourselves: The most online generation is also the worst at discerning fact from fiction on the internet.

also:

While social media may make news more accessible, there’s also little quality control to the information on the platforms. And although people of all ages are bad at detecting misinformation — which is only getting harder amid the rise of AI — members of Gen Z are particularly vulnerable to being fooled. Why? There’s a dangerous feedback loop at play. Many young people are growing deeply skeptical of institutions and more inclined toward conspiracy theories, which makes them shun mainstream news outlets and immerse themselves in narrow online communities — which then feeds them fabrications based on powerful algorithms and further deepens their distrust. It’s the kind of media consumption that differs drastically from older generations who spend far more time with mainstream media, and the consequences can be grim.

and one more bit:

I first became acquainted with Karen Barad’s work in the Automated Gaze seminar in 2nd year. Their work is a challenge to read through and understand. The conceptual framework around the transposition of quantum physics onto feminist critical theory proves why.

Recently, I was introduced to an essay Barad wrote on ‘touch’ and as I’m doing my dissertation on Artificial Intimacy and my final project on the relationship of two AI entities, I think this could be a good piece of writing to draw from. What follows are just a few surface reflections. Many quotes and ramblings will entail.

Each “individual” always already includes all possible intra-actions with “itself” through all the virtual others, including those that are noncontemporaneous with “itself.”

Barad describes how on the smallest scale of life, atoms interact with each other in such a way that what forms a ‘thing’ such as oneself is a multitude of interacting phenomena, so that each present conglomerate of a person/being is a collection of everything that could have or could have not existed. Intra-action is a term Barad uses to explain that agency comes from not a singular origin, but as arising from multiple causes/areas/experiences. 

I especially enjoyed how they talked about virtuality and these ‘virtual others’, as Barad sees virtual particles (therefore virtual anything) as real, but not present. Virtual particles are seen as “quanta of vacuum fluctuations”, as in they are the quanta of the void and on what is not being measured or a version of oneself that ‘could have’ happened.

Put very beautifully, “virtuality is a kind of thought experiment the world performs”, and I like that because it makes me think of all the kinds of multitudes of people I have been, as well as could have been if my particles interacted with others in just slightly different ways, and most excitingly all the kinds of things I will be from now on.

Indeterminacy is an un/doing of identity that unsettles the very foundations o non/being.

— Niels BOHR, The Philosophical Writings of Niels Bohr

(as quoted in Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning

Coined by KARAN BARAD

“agential realism reconceptualizes the process by which objects are examined and knowledge created in scientific activities. Barad emphasizes that agential realism is not just an epistemological theory, but an ontological one, as it describes how reality is actually shaped.”

“Agency, according to Barad, “is a matter of intra-acting; it is an enactment, not something that someone or something has.”

“Additionally, Barad emphasizes that matter is not just passive material that is shaped by agents; it undergoes a process as it “stabilizes over time to produce the effect of boundary, fixity, and surface.”

Barad identifies phenomena as the smallest unit for this intra-action and thus the building blocks for reality, which “is not composed of things-in-themselves or things-behind-phenomena, but things-in-phenomena.” (104) Phenomena represent the inseparability of an object and observations of it.

“In summary, the primary ontological units are not "things” but phenomena - dynamic topological reconfigurings/entanglements/relationalities/(re)articulations of the world.“

“Influential in the development of agential realism was Niels Bohr, a quantum physicist who asserted that observing apparatuses are not merely passive instruments, but things that participate in the formulation of scientific observation.”

“By granting apparatuses a more active role in the production of knowledge, Bohr challenged the separateness of observer and object by referring to “objects of observation” and “agencies of observation”.

“[T]his interaction between object and apparatus thus forms an inseparable part of the phenomenon.”

“[A]pparatuses are specific material reconfigurings of the world that do not merely emerge in time but iteratively reconfigure space-timematter as part of the ongoing dynamism of becoming.”

Taking Responsibility for Meaning and Mattering: An Agential Realist Approach to Generative AI and Literacy

By Priya Kumar, Kelley Cotter & Laura Y. Cabrera

Having traversed the vast theoretical terrains that unravel the illusion of the autonomous, bounded self—from Enlightenment individualism to post-structural decentring, from Buddhist concept of anātman / अनात्मन् (non-self) to Stoic radical cosmopolitanism, from Indigenous relationality to ecological embeddedness, we now stand before a different kind of threshold: not epistemological, but…