The Project Brief 4 deadline is drawing closer and closer, so naturally Rose and I continued to work on the project during the workshop – specifically, on the reference list and adding the information from the references into the “about” page on our website. The Project brief 4 is submitted via each of our own blogs and onto our shared google drive folder. Although this was technically “class-time”, we still recorded it in the minutes of the group.
The class itself was instructed on how to submit our reflective posts. We are to write one last entry in our blog to reflect on our experience in the course (up to 500 words). We have to focus on “light-bulb moments”. We include links to 5 posts within this summary submission post (these 5 posts are supposed to be our “best” posts of either assignments and/or weekly reflections) and a scanned image of a “learning graph”. We put all of this onto our blog and a copy onto our google drive folder.
For the lectorial, we looked at a fairly new media theory; media materialism. We operate on a level of being directly engaged with technology, working with/on the cloud. However, everything we do is still grounded where we are.
There are 3 main areas of media materialism; technology, technique, and culture. Technology contains computer code, microwave rays, and hammers – as well as the skills to use these tools. Technique incorporates those skills that are uniquely human, such as using our hand to turn a screw or using or brain to read languages and algebra – essentially, the role of the human body. Finally, culture, is identifying subgroups within the population, the world as culture, humankind, and art, theater, cinema:creative expression.
One fear of technology is that it would spiral out of control (often seen in many sci-fi films/books/shows), first thought of in “Dr. Frankenstein”. Its been almost 200 years since it was published, but the fears of our technology going too far is still around us, either by politics, and still in films/games/books/shows etc. We were then shown a clip of a short online film called “KARA” which continues with the theme of robots thinking for themselves and possibly removing the “status quo” of humans being the only sentient creatures in existence.
We were then shown a trailer for the video game “The Last of Us”, which looks at how different people find scarce resources and interact with others. We were then told to pick a question presented before us for our blog in about 300 words.
I chose “innovation and progress is hindered by scientific regulation” – The human race has advanced its technology more over the last 500 years than in the millions of years before it combined, and even more in just the last century. Clearly, it isn’t too hindered, but we could be farther along, perhaps. Some government policies have pushed back research into stem cells, despite their ability to potentially cure Alzheimers – the same is done to marijuana despite clinically proven cancer-representativeness in it. However, sometimes things can go a little too far – the Nazis experimented with prisoners and “undesirables” in hypothermia – information that we use and has saved countless lives, but still the experiments were horrible. In “The Island of Dr. Moreau”, he experiments with animals and combines them with human beings to create hybrids. While it is certainly a scientific jump, it doesn’t really have any practical uses and doesn’t really help progress humanity.
That being said, the reason people didn’t really progress or show much innovation until the last 500 years was because of government policies across much of the known world – with witch trials and executions and accusations of blasphemy being a main staple that kept humanity grounded in fear and superstition, so that the common man is just there to serve – for if they were allowed to think new ideas they might think that the feudal system wasn’t all that fair. When the Renaissance hit Europe, new ideas of society, culture, politics, and science arose without nearly as much fear of social or government persecution. That era gave us Shakespeare, Da Vinci, and . Clearly, innovation and progress is hindered by scientific regulation.
We were then reminded again of the reflective portfolio – nothing new compared to the workshop was said except our attention was drawn to the link at the bottom for an assessment declaration that we are to sign and send via google drive.