martes, 26 de febrero de 2013

Reasserting the human




This advertisement for the Toyota GT86 plays on some of the dystopic visions of our immersion in a pixellated simulation of reality which may be familiar from some of the previous clips you’ve looked at. Here, the reality and authenticity of human emotion is aligned with speed, control and a ‘breaking out’ of the artificial into the ‘natural’.



This advert takes on the theme of mediation and, again, the nature of ‘authentic’ human contact.


World builder is a short film which explores some of the same themes (simulation, immersion, artifice) as the Toyota advertisement, though in a slightly more nuanced way.


This short film has a darkly comic grounding idea which we won’t spoil here! The vision of humanity it constructs is one which is rich but also slightly repellent - it works to make the notion of ‘the human’ seem strange.




Ideas and interpretation

Humanity 2.0: defining humanity - Steve Fuller’s TEDx Warwick talk (24:08), http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/newsandevents/podcasts/media/more/tedx?podcastItem=steve_fuller.mp4

View the presentation slides here
Badmington, Neil (2000) Introduction: approaching posthumanism. Posthumanism. Houndmills; New York: Palgrave.http://www.palgrave.com/PDFs/0333765389.Pdf

This chapter is the editor’s introduction to a collection of essays by thinkers on posthumanism. It gives a very useful overview of some of the philosophical and cultural bases for arriving at a position we might reasonably call ‘posthuman’. It is important to understand that ‘posthumanism’ is not simply another way of talking about cyborgs or other fantasies of human enhancement - it has a philosophical and critical inheritance which is far more to do with the question of how we define and value what it means to be human. In this sense, it is much more theoretically rich than the ‘transhumanism’ with which it is sometimes confused.




Perspectives on education

Kolowich, S (2010) The Human Element. Inside Higher Ed http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/03/29/lms
Monke, L (2004) The Human Touch, EducationNext http://educationnext.org/thehumantouch/
Monke’s article is a plea for a re-thinking of education policy prioritising technological ‘literacy’ in schools from the earliest years of education.
This article attempts to make a case for the inclusion of more video and audio in online teaching, in order to increase the sense of presence and ‘human-touch’ for distance learners.


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