Long Live Death

We watched a video in class lat week that was created by a group of people who want to develop medicine to the point were people will live forever. I thought about my grandma while I was watching the film. She was always been a very indepenant, dynamic, capable woman. She was able to accomplish more in an hour than most people do all day. Until her stroke two years ago. She lost the ability to speak and whole right side of her body is now paralyzed. She lives in a home in a wheelchair and crys and yells. She is so unhappy. I think for her death will be a relief. For her sake I hope we never overcome death.

Granted, if we were able to modify medicine to the point that we no longer knew death, we would probably be able to prevent or deal with strokes as well. But there are other reason I disagree with what those people were fighting for.

It isn’t practical.  If death was eliminated the world would quickly become overpopulated.  Issues around adequate food and resources for an immortal population weren’t addressed by the group. And what about death by natural disasters? Improving medical technology won’t prevent a massive earthquake or hurricane from claiming thousands of lives.  Death also occurs do to accidents as well.

At what point would a person chose to enter immortality?  What would be the magic age?   Would everyone be the same age?  Would you work forever?  Who could afford to support an immortal group of retirees? What about moral or religious sentiments?

For those, including myself, who believe in an after life, the idea of immortality in this life seems tragic.  It would mean that I would never be with those who have passed on before me.  Removing death would erase the direction and perspective that a limited lifetime offers.  It would alter my purpose and direction.  The idea seems very dismal.  I image wandering the same world, living the same life for thousands of years, and it seems very depressing.  It lacks progression.

There were somethings they said that I agreed with.  I think that the development of lifesaving technology is wonderful.  It is amazing to have lives saved and preserved, but that is different from immortality.  I agree with their sentiments about fighting aging.  If we are able to uncover knowledge that helps society maintain some of its youthfulness and energy, that is a very positive thing.

I’m not saying I don’t want to live forever.  I jsut don’t want to live this life forever.

The Inperson Vs. the Online Interview

    Yesterdays experiment in class with interviewing in person and then online really made what Kivits wrote about make sense.  I really think there are some definite advantages and disadvantages to each approach.  My partner and I found that we covered a lot more material in a lot less time when we were speaking face to face, but it was more ackward and we were each a little more hesitate to ask personal questions.  We felt like we had to develop some sort of friendship before we were comfortable with asking questions about each others lives.  This is similar to what Kivits talked about needing to do with online research as well.  Maybe it is important to establish a friendly relationship in any kind  of interviewing.

With the online interview my partner sometimes only answered part of the question and he wasn’t able to clarify what it was exactly that I was asking, but we thought that this type of interview is beneficial because of its flexibility.  If an interviewee has a busy reschedule, he or she can respond to a question whenever it is convenient for them.  The drawback to this though, is that there is sometimes long periods of waiting on the other end.  Another benefit we saw to this type of interviewing is that all the information is already stored in the computer and doesn’t need to be typed from a recording.  It is organized and dated.  We also felt more comfortable opening up when we were interacting on the screen than face to face.

In face to face interviewing though there was more humor.  We were able to change tone quickly and share jokes and then get right back into what we were doing.  We covered a lot more material, but the interviewer found it distraction to try to record and listen at the same time.  We also felt more awkward and shy with one another.

There are drawback and benefits to each approach and they would have to be considered for a research project.  For myself, my decision would depend on the type of research I was doing and the accessibility of the people I was trying to reach.

Cyborgs in Schools

Yesterdays quiz question got me thinking a little bit more about cyborgs and how they welcome new technologies as a part of themselves and are actively reshaping the structure and politics of the world around them. It reminded me of an experience I had in in high school.

We had a teacher who was relatively new in the profession and was working on his masters outside of teaching. He was very much about finding newer and better ways of doing things. As part of a project for his masters he presented a proposal to the school board and we became the first school in Canada to have Pockey PCs issued to the students. They were fantastic.  The palm pilots came with compact folding keyboards so we took all out notes in all our classes using the new machines.  We beamed our assignments to the teacher as he walked around the room.  There were no lost assignments and no waste of paper.  Everything was stored neatly and in an organized fashion right inside the device.   They were especially useful during group work because we could beam file to one another.  This function was also found to be useful for those who didn’t do their homework…… But they weren’t just practial, they were a lot of fun too.  I downloaded music and games onto my PDA and survived Bio 30, emerging as the tetras champion of the class.

It was neat to be the first school incorporate this technology into your curriculum, especially since we were such a small, seemingly insignificant school (my graduating class was 61 students).  The local new stations all came and I remeber watching myself on the evening news after being interviewed.  What was really cool was the way one teacher’s idea had brought us access to a technology that changed the way we interacted at school.  He and the technology were living in the realm of the cyborg where boundaries are always being challenged in an effort to find newer and better ways to collect and process information.

Ode to the Cell Phone

    Today’s podcast caused me to reflect on experiences which I shared with my own cell phone.  Unfortunately, I no longer own the mobile means of communication, but when I did I was able to keep contact with all people at all times and in all places.  Although there came a time when this included unwanted contact.  Let me explain….

I didn’t recognize the phone number flashing on my cell phone’s display screen.  It was 2:30 int he morning and I couldn’t understand who had woken my up.  With sleep in my voice I flipped open the phone and said hello.  There was distinguishable breathing on the other end but no body said anything.  Oddly enough I was sure I heard typing too.  Assuming a the call was some sort of a mistake, I curled back under the covers and went to sleep.

The same number called me 3 more times the next day, and always the smae thing.  No hello, breathing, faint sound of a keyboard clicking.  The number showed up on my phone 26 times that week.  I started calling it back.  I would hear a few click and beeps and then the ever present breathing.  “Stop Calling!!!”  I would yell into the phone, but it persisted.  It continued for over two months.  The calls would come throughout the day and continued into weird hours of the night.  Finally my boyfriend convinced me to go to the police and report that I had a stalker.  I filled out a police report and they called me back that afternoon.  They had tracked down my stalker.

Turned out, that my “stalker” was a 86 year old deaf and mute woman.  Seriously.  Which explained the faint sounds of a keyboard and the beeps and clicks when I called her.  She never heard me telling her to stop calling and didn’t know she had the wrong number.  The poor lady was trying desperately to get a hold of a friend of hers (who had a machine that interpreted her typing and could properly receive her calls).

     Kinda funny if you ask me.  In fact thinking about my cell phone has brought back lots of memories.  I never realized how many things I associated with that phone.

Although I no longer carry a cell phone, I am certainly not against it, I’m just not dependant on it  either.  I had one, I used i, I loved it, we shared good times, but my contract ran out and I got a land line.  I don’t think I suffered withdrawal.  Its true that I had to sit down and copy all my phone numbers into an actual address book, but beyond that I don’t think I thought to much about it after that.  Perhaps the transition was made easier by the fact that at the same time I had moved and was in a new house and a new city and I new job.  Perhaps I just took its absence in stride with all the other adjustments being made.  My cell phone ceased to be a part of me.  Does that mean that cyborgs have the ability shed our skin after technology has penetrated it?  Can our bodies reconstruct themselves after they are been constructed with technology.  Maybe thats part of being a cyborg – having the ability to morph and adjust and change networks.

The stalker Situation could have been worse.  Check out “The Singing Stalker”:

The Worth of a Dollar

    When I was a child I considered myself quite wealthy to enter the candy store with a “whole dollar!”.  I considered very long and carefully before making a decision about how I got get the most for my money.  Today, what does a dollar buy me?  An hour on one of the school’s parking meters, a candy bar in the checkout line, a new pen at the doallar store…..or “today’s new gift on Facebook.”

    These “gifts” make about as much sense to me now as buying water did when I was 6.  My young mind couldn’t figure out why anybody would waste their valuable dollar on a bottle of water – water’s free!  and now my adult mind doesn’t understand why anybody spends their money on an idea of a gift instead of a actual gift.  In fact it remind me of the slightly clueless boyfriend I had in high school who would proudly announce that he had thought about buying me flowers “just because……although hadn’t actually had the chance to make it to the florist, but its the thought that counts, right?!?……no quite.

    I agree withthe notion shared several of the author discussed by Bell that the internet had changed the economy.  New ways for the trading of goods and capital have emerged, among them, what seems like the purchasing of nothing.   Someone is collecting every time you send a Facebook friend the picture of a little teddy bear of a bright red flower, but that someone is never required to actually deliver anything.  Capital is flowing and pictures of goods are flowing but no actuall goods are flowing.

    This type of market isn’t limited to Facebook.  The same thing is going on in the avatar world.  People are purchasing ideas and symbols but no tangible goods are being produced.  Real money is being paid, but real things aren’t being bought.

       My husband took a computer science class last year and came home one day and told me about a game that is being played on the computer where a certain type of points are strongly desired.  These point can be won through the game of course, but it takes a fair amount of time and effort.  In response to this demand for these point, a group in Korea has organised a system for harvesting and selling the coveted points.  Entire warehouses are filled with computer playing employees whose sole purpose is to seek and collect as many of these points on the game as possible.  Then people from around the world get out there credit cards and hand over capital for an intangible good.

     Obviously these ideas must be worth something.  No body pays good money for nothing.  It is the purchasing of ideas rather than actually goods, and it existed before the internet.  People have always purchased things that are meant to represent something significant, such as band names or other status symbols.   It is fascinating to see how this market of symbol purchasing has adapted to the changing economy within cyberspace.

    For me a dollar no longer hold the wonder it did when I was a kid, but is still has value, and even though I understand that purchasing an idea isn’t a new thing, I’d probably be the last person to punch my creadit card number into the computer screen in exchange for a graphic gift.  I’ll pay real money for real goods!

The World is Closing In

    Last summer my then finance and I made a decision.  We would be migrating north to the land of cold and desolation for the winter in a place called Saskatoon (no offense intend for those originating or sharing any special affiliation with the place…) and thus needed to find a place to live out there.  Fortunate were we that my husband has friends who already “survive” out there during most of the year, but who, like us, return during the summers.  They too needed to find a place to live.   It is a six and half hour drive each way, so it looked like we would have to take a few days off work to head out there…until our generous friends offered us a seat on a small airplane that they were going out on.  The father of our friend is a successful man and has joined with several other successful men in purchasing a small private plane, which he kindly offered to all of us.  Think about haw small the world becomes when you own your own plane!  Suddenly Saskatoon was a day trip, it took one hour to get there, a few hours to find a place, and an hour to get home.  Owning you own plane means that suddenly it isn’t such an inconvienence if you need to “drop by” New York or Nevada for a couple hours.  For the owner of this plane it meant that he and his wife could go visit their children spread across the United States with far less hassle.  The world becomes a smaller place.

This idea of the world closing in reoccurred earlier this weekend.   I was again preparing to return to Saskatoon, but this time it was job preparations I was making.  With hte housing industry boom spreading out there, Real Estate seemed like something to be considered.  I called one of the hiring agencies and inquired as the whether or not my limited sales experience would qualify me for the job.  I was directed to a website:

www.simulator.joinsutton.com

     

A website eliminated the distance between here and Saskatoon.  The world got a little smaller.  The website contained an hour long simulation, which I was told on the phone when I called the agency, is more effective than any job interview ever has been for them.  The woman on the phone explained that the results of the simulation are automatically analyzed by the program and the results are given to the company managers.  This is how they screen those applying before ever spending valuable time in an interview.  Through the simulation, I meat and talked with “people”, I found them homes to buy, I sold their property, and I conducted Open Houses.  My interactions with this computer program will help the people at Sutton decide if I would be a good agent and I am considered before ever having to travel to an interview.

It seems to me that as innovations, like the airplane or the internet, are made accessible and usable to everyone that the corners of the world begin to come into reach.  It reminds me of the ideas of Castell who describes a “new world” where economy, society and culture, become interconnected through the information age.  Its not likely that I will ever own a private little plane, and I don’t plan on it, but I do expect the world to continue moving toward me through the use of growing innovations and expanding networks.

First Time User

    To tell you the truth, I honestly don’t recall the very first time I ever used the internet.  Although I do remember the first time I wrapped my little fingers around a mouse.  I was just going into kindergarten when mom and dad loaded all five kids into the old station wagon and head for futureshop for our family’s first computer.   The program “paint” kept my five year old mind busy and the big red reset button held my baby brother’s attention.

I remember the sound of the dial-up modem.  I remember “Jetpack” and “Pac-Man” and family solitaire tournaments.  I remember typing class and floppy discs in grade 3, hard disks by grade 5, and then the internet.  Somewhere in that time the internet entered our home and became something to learn about at school.  At home I created my very first email address and sent messages to my friends who lived down the street and who I talked to everyday.  My knowledge and need for the computer, and particularly the internet, grew quickly.  Soon I was “surfing the web” and joining chat rooms.   I was doing research for school and handing in typed assignments.  I discovered on-line games and comics, and cared for my own virtual companion on Neopets.

     

The transition into a digit world seemed nearly natural to me.  Today I have become what Bakardjieva would call a “daily user.”   The internet is hugely useful in my daily life, especially as a student.  But immediate access to  a world of information  is helpful for every aspect of my lifestyle, including online banking and bill paying, shopping, socializing, and business transactions.  Its funny to think that I can reminisce about a time before computers in a way that my own children never will, but I can’t imagine the world any other way.