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

ON “CREATION OF A BACTERIAL CELL CONTROLLED BY A CHEMICALLY SYNTHESIZED GENOME” BY VENTER ET AL” [5.20.10]

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

Concept 17 Application Note article:

"The Challenges of Defining and Studying “Digital Addiction” in Children"
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2734210

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.