Ontological implications
17. Representational Fears
Fear of Fragmentation
- Every new representational medium has been accompanied by fear that representational arts can be delusional.
- The more persuasive the medium, the more dangerous.
- Digital can assimilate all previous representations . . . so seems excessively dangerous.
- Worries over the power of a simulated world to alter the mind’s conception of its own desires
Fragmentation of the Self
- Especially troubling in the case of young people.
- Multiple roles across multiple mediums and avatorial representations
Answer to fragmentation--Kaleidoscopic Vision?
- Multiform narratives
feature alternative time/action lines; Readers assume a more active role
when processing them.
- We may learn to understand narrative PROCESS (rather than just practices and/or outcomes).
- Immersion is possible here; agency has real outcomes.
- Digital media can manage multi-form-ality via procedurals, spatiality
- Because of the encyclopedic nature of computers, digital communication technologies might help us master the fragmentation of the age.
Order of the third order: "As we invent new principles of organization that make sense in a world of knowledge freed from physical constraints, information doesn't just want to be free, it wants to be miscellaneous. The more information, the more possible ways to search, find, organize. The more ways to search & find, the less organized; the less organized, the better the chances of finding what you really want.
Future Shock, Past and Present (NPR, “On the Media, February 19, 2010
Virtual Human Interaction Lab - Stanford University--video collection
VHIL: Virtual Human Interaction Lab - Stanford University
{ VHIL VIDEO: RESEARCH OVERVIEW - 10 MINUTE VERSION }
Research Overview - 1 hour version
Article for Concept Application Note:
U.K. Doctors Call for Caution in Children’s Use of Screens and Social Media
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/07/world/europe/uk-doctors-screen-time.html
Want to learn more ? (I
mean, besides watching the Matrix trilogy another
10 times!)
Janet Murray: Hamlet
on the Holodeck. MIT Press, Updated Edition, 2017.
Jim Blascovich and Jeremy Bailenson, Infinite Reality: Avatars, Eternal Life, New Worlds, and the Dawn of the Virtual Revolution, Harper Colllins, 2011.
David Weinberger, Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder, Holt, 2008.
Edward Castronova, Exodus to the Virtual World, St, Martin's Griffin, 2007.
Edward Castronova on the Exodus to the Virtual World, EconTalk Episode with Edward Castronova, Hosted by Russ Roberts
[1:11:44]
Edward Castronova, Synthetic Worlds: The Business and Culture of Online Games, U. Chicago P, 2005.
