Nanotext Final

1. Book groups: the additional texts have been a key component of the course. How has the work in your book groups differed from that which takes place in our discussions of the other texts in class and elsewhere (plurk & blogs)? What kinds of discussions are possible in the setting of the book groups? What is not possible within these settings?

Being a part of a book group was a new experience for me. Having to work out the detail and make a plan of action is always the hardest think to do in a group. Especially as the number of people you have to contact increases. The next difficulty in the group is finding initiative from people. A group needs someone to lead it along the way into different discussions and also to make decisions like the reading schedule. For some reason I have noticed that people don’t like taking indicative especially in college classes when thinks come to team work. That’s why I decide to be the lead when I could. It’s very rewarding in the end for me to make this effort since on the evaluation people noted my effort. Yet the truth is that being in the lead is rather easy because it doesn’t necessarily require some kind of better knowledge on the subject from the leader but rather the desire to lead and people skills are also helpful. After the discussion is opened up by a person the rest of the groups feels it is easier to join the discussion, knowing that they no longer have to start the topic and can just express their ideas.

All this was different from the Blog and from Plurk because in those cases you where only thinking about your own work, you had to lead yourself and follow your own thoughts on the books you read. In the book group you had a chance to discuss, explain, argue and agree on the points the other readers made. In a way that helped explore the book more in depth because it each person in the group to saw the book through the eyes of the rest of its members. In a blog you don’t see this process of interaction between different people, and you usually don’t see the growth that comes from those interactions. A blog is one person opinion and insight on the subject, while a book group takes each individuals opinion and tries to reflect on the similarities and differences for the benefits of the group as a whole. Plurk is also a place where each person is on his/her own. You don’t have to collaborate with others or to even talk to them to get your work done. Plurk was used for a lot of completely different and random topics discussed by members of the whole class rather then just focused on one subject with a defined group.

Within a book group discussions are mostly addressing the topic of the book and rarely go beyond that only if to explain something that yet again goes back to the book. It is inappropriate to go off on a random tangent in this setting because by making this group we have in a way picked our topic of interest, and are now bound to it. I think that this is good because that insures that the topic of the book will not be replaces with something random and that the members focus more deeply on each subject in the book because the book is constrained by the amount if pages in it. On the other hand Plurk is a place with no constraints where anything that interests the Plurker can be discussed. Yet by focusing on just the book we as a group get more insights on it and also get a more thorough understanding of it.
In the book group that we had via blackboard I think it was rather impossible to get too personal with the other members. For the most part I didn’t know who the members where and all we talked about was the book, therefore I never got to know the members more in terms of their life away from the book. I think that this lacking component is essential for forming some kind of emotional bond. With Plurk on the other hand I got to know people though their pictures and ideas and plurk themes with showed me the person behind the screen and made me more connect more with each person on their. So I think that a book group is good for getting a thorough understanding of one book in particular but it won’t bring up a closer bond between its members if done via blackboard.


2. Plurk: Without it the class would not be the class. Using the texts we have read in class explain how plurk fits in with the issues of technology and the human body that we have discussed thus far.

Plurk to me was a great example of alternity. It was a new world for every member of the class where each person could redefine themselves. Also every member of plurk was a stranger to the other members yet it was the same situation as the artificial stranger in “Radical Alternity.” The fact that we didn’t know each other created a distance between us which made it easier to openly share ideas without the fear or being looked down upon by someone you know. Like the book also said technology is a way to form alternity and that is exactly what we where doing by using the computer, the internet, the website. The interesting process that followed the stranger phase is that the plurk names each person created began to grow an identity. I would see people on plurk and just see their plurk name and over time my ideas about the person would be intervened with his plurk name and that would form his/her plurk identity. The best part is that I never will know the differences between the plurker I met and the person who real life person who plurks his ideas. On the other hand plurk let you share the thoughts you wouldn’t otherwise share with other people with other plurkers, so maybe in a way we all got a chance to know each other much better then we would have through other mediums of communication. The great thing about plurk was the way you could create yourself on there by editing your theme and using emotions and by sharing things with others, be those things pictures, videos or ideas. Without that possibility of personalizing our plurk pages I don’t think the class would have bonded as well as it has. Another thing that we discussed in class is the manipulation of emotions, which was sooo easy to do on plurk. I mean I remember Tony putting a sad crying face when we where in class to reflect the topic that tears add sadness to the face, yet the people who were not in class and saw that image probably thought that Tony was sad for real. As the class progressed plurks became more complex in that people started discussing topics of their interest like books and theories and enriched them through videos and pictures and you had to really follow the plurking to stay on track. In a way this reminds me of the Big Pig high where you are constantly getting more and more information, adding new plurks, new photos, new videos to continue your thoughts on the idea. In between the intellectual discussions plurk also offered a place to just vent or let other people know how you where doing. It was like having little orthids who would try to cheer you up or talk to you about the concerns of your day. The final thing that I will mention about Plurk being great for this class in particular is the 140 character limit. It made the writer think about how to condense their writing without loosing meaning. Since nanotext is the study of the small, it showed us that you can do anything with those 140 characters by either condensing or commenting on your own post. The trick was that in order to do anything with the 140 character you just had to be creative. So the “limit” actually thought us how to think outside the limit to achieve what we want using the small to creative the big and wise versa. The same can be said about nanotechnology as creative small technological objects that can combine to create bigger objects which can later deteriorate to become small again. I think that like it was said in the question, Plurk was an essential component of this class and that we molded to fit out study of the small and had great ideas come from that.

3. Limits: one of the ways that we have approached the small is with our plurk assignments, in your opinion how have these limits: 1) made you think about language 2) made you think about the small 3) helped you with your writing

Plurk assignments seemed at first just a fun way to plurk, but when looking back on it I have come to realize that before doing them I have never though about thinking how to write. Having limits in how to write was a new and fun idea, yet more importantly it started the idea about thinking how to write. It also made me look in search of new words when I couldn’t use the ones I was used to, because they where excluded. The limit of in the 140 characters was the one that we had to work with all quarter throughout the other limits Tony gave us so it is also important to discuss is along with the assignments. After a while we started saying that everything is possible inside the 140 characters and that is quite true. The limited amount of space made it more efficient for people to condense their ideas to include only the most valuable thoughts. This provoked the feeling of expressing your ideas in as few words as needed to get the point across. This evolved into putting up videos and pics to get a complex thought across while still being well within the limit. So in a sense the limit pushed a plurker to think more creatively about achieving things outside the 140 characters limit. Thinking about small writing makes me realize the power to being able to clearly express your idea in as few words as possible.

I have always thought that I need to improve my writing skills. All the work that we did with Plurk helped me understand that an important element of writing is really thinking beforehand about what I want to explain to the reader and then how am I going to say it in a simple format. Furthermore the limit that we used on our words in plurk made me think about the necessity of having a broad knowledge of words so that you can express an idea in the most articulate way. Also this is beneficial in writing because it varies the vocabulary inside a text. When it comes to personal writing I think that plurk was helpful in identifying important elements through all my writing. By that I mean that when I write in my diary I like to fully express all my ideas and feeling without sparing and words, yet then I can go back and limit some parts of the text that is more relevant then the rest and reflect on just those pieces in the future. I think it’s important to be able to define the significant small pieced from inside a bid piece and the limit in plurk was a way of learning how to do that. This was best seen when a lot of people where plurking at the same time and it was up to the reader to choose which messages where important to follow and which were not.


4. Animals and Machines: our texts have been filled with both of these things. Working with Ronell & Kac’s text Life Extreme, make a case for the difference between animals and machines. Is there such a difference? And where do humans fit in all of this?

Before this class started I though of technology and animals as being two separate entities yet now my thoughts on the subject have shifted a bit. I think that technology was created to simulate human/animal behavior with the goal of making human life easier or to gain power over nature (think air conditioning) and other human being (think military advancements). The research and development in biology and technology has come to advance to a level where the two groups have started to combine. Examples of this combination can be seen in the pictures in “Life Extreme.” In this book we see the example of animals and plants that were created through bio-tech advancements. Despite the fact that these animals/plants are not found in nature I would not call them machines. Machines to me are creations that do not have a living brain, ones that don’t breath or feel emotions, machines to me are those things that need to be programmed my humans in order to operate. All those things make up a machine to me, yet I fully understand that in the future, perhaps not too far away, machines can become more “alive” with the use of biotechnology, but since that hasn’t happen yet I prefer to not guess and base my answer on the present state of development. In which case animals and machines are two different things which are starting to move closer together.

Animals are not machines and machines are not animals at least for now. Animals have a desire to live to breathe and to love, which comes to them from birth. Yet machines don’t have desires, they have programs that they follow. Even animals that where not naturally produces in nature, but where rather made in labs, are still not machines to me because they still have an ability to think for themselves, the capability to breath and to bleed which a machine can’t. With all that said it’s hard to define what makes and animals such, because then a machine can be created to simulate those definitions. When Plato defined a human as a “featherless, biped animal” people then applauded him and now we realize that a plucked chicken can fit that description and will not be any closer to being a human. The same goes for machines they can imitate qualities of animals but imitating something doesn’t make it real. I can foresee that technological advanced might change that but for now machines are not animals.

So where do humans fall into in this question of machines and humans? I think that humans are just another animal. Yet humans are on the top of the food chain and they have taken control over the earth and the animals below themselves. Being on this imaginary higher ground above other animals made humans feel like it is ok to create machines and play biological games with other animals all in the name of science and self interest I might add. Humanity can be seen in a way as a boy who burns an ant by using a magnifying glass, the boy represents humanity, the ant represent other animals and the earth and the glass is the bio/tech advances humans make. Each person I guess wants to play God and by manipulating life on the planet they feel they are Gods in a way. I think that this kind of power is dangerous and should have some kind of safeguard on it, but people like me won’t be heard behind the people who are doing all they can to make technological advances happen. Because we really need glow in the dark bunnies, or Schwarzenegger cows, or hypoallergenic cats, don’t we? I think not!



5.Filth/Censorship/Mores/Sexuality and Technology:

Sexuality is a topic that is rarely discussed in the open. The way that society sees sexuality as something private has to do a lot with that I think. Talking about sex in public is consequently seen as rude, vulgar and dirty. Sex becomes something you can’t discuss in the open yet something everyone seeks. Knowing that everyone wants sex, people try to sell sex through advertising, modeling and plain up porn. While the first two ways to sell sex are socially accepted, pornography is looked down upon because it is more revealing.

Further consideration should be given to the way that society tells us sex is ok. What I mean is that it is ok to have sex is you are in love and if it is love between a man and a woman. Otherwise if any part of that is not present, say sex is present without love or that its between two men or women the socially accepted thing to do is to judge and look down upon these actions. The reason the Ticket that Exploded had so much resistance is that it showed the reader a relationship exactly contradicting the norms of sex with love between a heterosexual couple. There was love and definitely no women even close by in the Ticket. Yet the hardest part about the Ticket was to discuss it in class. It made us confront the reason each individual was uncomfortable talking about the book. The obvious reason was because it had a lot of sex in it, and no one wants to come off as being the perverted, promiscuous person who openly talks about sex. Yet after doing that work with the book I think people realized that yes its sex, so what? You can talk about it and that doesn’t make you a worst off person like society would have us believe. Thus when we moved on to working on the Filth it was easier to look at the graphic sex images without feeling shocked at them. I guess once you have seen the things in the Ticket the level of things that will shock you go up more and more things become acceptable to the mind of the reader this way. As for the way that people addressed their emotions about the Ticket and Filth it makes a lot of sense that many tried to express it in the most anonymous ways because then they can share their true feeling on the subject without and fear of harsh judgment or resentment from others. I think that blog entries are probably the most anonymous of the three (plurk, class, blog) forms of communication we had for this class. So I expect that to be the place that most people expressed their truest feeling about those books. In the class room you are the least anonymous since people can see who you are and can directly link their judgment of your comments to you. Next we have plurk where you are somewhat anonymous depending on the kind of level of anonymity you wanted to reach (I mean that in a sense that you could make it so no one had clue who you really where or you could make it rather obvious) and so depending on that level you know that the comments you make will be linked to you only if the reader actually knows who you are. If not they will link it to your plurk identity of they might not even look at your post with the help of the “mark all as read” button. Finally there is the blog which is the most anonymous strangely enough because although all the thoughts on it are directly yours, you can choose who you show the blog to and even if you post the link to your blog on plurk the chance that everyone will go ahead and read it is rather low from my experience, so I think that knowing (or maybe assuming) that less people will read your blog then your ideas on plurk makes it more anonymous and therefore more sincere.

What I find amusing about all of this is that society as a whole decides what is the right way for people to live, how/who to love, what way to interact with people and so on. Yet no one is perfect and so if they do something wrong and still want to be respected by society they will try to cover it up. Like the case with porn sight viewing in conservative states. It makes complete sense that a place that tries to be all proper on the outside had dirty secrets on the inside. The more you try to deny something the more you will want it. Yet I find this whole wanting to please society c*** hilarious, I mean you can’t ever please everyone, so why try? Why change who you are so as to please other people? And finally why does it even matter what other people think of you lifestyle? I think that sex should be a more openly discussed topic since it is a big part of our life. I find it funny and sad how the hardest person to talk about sex to is your sexual partner. I find it sad that people tell other people who to love and people listen to them denying their natural instincts. “Society” is a way to limit a person’s life and tell him how to live. Just think of the Matrix, there is no such thing as an ideal perfect society. There can’t be rules to make it such either. We are not robots to follow the whims of “society” and each person needs to realize that before it’s too late; and he/she need to start thinking about what they want to do in life and not what someone else wants them to do. So if you want to watch porn be my guest but don’t go back and tell other not to watch porn because then you are being a hypocrite, and trying to control other peoples’ lives too.