Well, despite another early morning, the class that I went to was great. It was Digital Culture, and it had a really interesting format. It’s a three hour class, the first hour is listening to a discussion with a guest speaker, the second hour is bouncing around the class with each class member as a ‘privileged speaker’ talking about the relevance of a short newsbyte to digital culture and the last hour is a general discussion by the whole class on the topics covered. Fascinating stuff, getting all the different perspectives on various topics. Here are a few of my thoughts that I wrote down during the class, which is based off of the later part of discussion from Living the digital self.

Digital identity fuzziness
The identity of the avatar is you, but isn’t you; an avatar is an expression of your digital self, but is also its own identity in and of itself, with its own quirks, its own friends, its own reality. Is it any less ‘real’ because it has no physical basis?

Anonymity
Divorce own personal choices because privacy ensures that curiosity can be explored more fully. This is the same as people moving about in ‘meat-space’ in disguises (going back as far as you’d care to) in order to participate in activities that they would potentially be ashamed to admit they were curious about, or wanted to do. This could be a mistress, a gang, or creating a flower garden. Each person has their own sense of what does and doesn’t fit into their ‘regular’ life. Exploration of pornography and other adult material is probably the most common example, both on- and off-line.

Babies online
Developing an online identity; same problem: what is the right ‘face’ to display; also the effect of increasing digital immersion/saturation – will it be common for the younger generations to have several personas each, explored through various digital realities in order to more fully express themselves? In the case of a baby, it might be such that their website presents their ‘real’ persona to their world via the internet, and personal exploration of things potentially shameful would be done through an avatar persona, not directly linked to the ‘real’ them. Does giving a baby a website give them that choice? As long as the child is educated about digital culture and customs, I don’t believe that it is necessarily a bad thing, especially if the Internet becomes a domain in which the child has a particular interest later on in life.

Distraction
The importance of ‘daydreaming’ on thought, leaving ideas “in the back of your mind”; companies already recognize the effective hours are different from the hours an employee is present, and there is an industry devoted to analyzing company habits and improving that efficiency tradeoff between effective and present hours.

Digital art makes you smarter?
Not smarter, but allows for multi-tasking everyday complexity to be potentially translated to the story domain.

The Virtual Girlfriend
Emotional response and stimulation in digital entity. Programmable complexity can indicate that it not only can simulate ‘honeymoon phase’ but could go beyond that depending on the artificial intelligence behind it. The question becomes whether or not this would lead to less ‘personability’ in people. Would it? Does having a relationship, friendship or interaction with a virtual person make your own emotional responses any less valid or ‘real’? With internet relationships that are totally virtual and never meet in ‘meat space’ that are emotionally fulfilling for the participants, can society label them as ‘wrong’ because they do not believe they can be happy, because they do not understand it and therefore fear it? Is it a response made out of fear that people will no longer be necessary, that everyone will sink into a Matrix-like status and only interact with virtual entities? This reminded me also of the more philosophical question asked in the recent television remake of Battlestar Galactica, where they questioned the emotional relationships that the humans had with the machines (that looked like humans).

Games are reality
The effect of digital identity and its escapism from the ‘real’ identity; does not a digital identity merely provide us a way to explore ourselves but a way to create the person that we want to be, that we believe ourselves to be underneath the ‘meat space’ version of ourselves.

Online dating
Search through entered identities for particular profile; what value is there in dishonesty? Is it possible to specify correctly what makes a good partner for you? In this respect it might be more realistic to use sites that match profiles for you, however that does remove a lot of the elements of ‘dating’ in the first place, in being able to test out people’s personalities before you decide to be with them. There is, of course, the opinion that “you should know as little about someone as possible before you marry them” (The Importance Of Being Earnest, Oscar Wilde), although the expression of that argument is usually more ironic

Archiving identity
Digital capability for each person to leave a legacy/identity for posterity. The vanity of humanity to believe in their own importance/immortality can be realized in a new medium. What about a “higher purpose” or “greater good” as a form of immortality? This would be about information without identity, a movement – does the human want its name to live on, its personality, or its message? What is a name without a message?

Right, since that was probably a little more than anyone who bothers to read this actually would ever want to think about in digital culture, let’s move on… and yes, I know a lot of that is in note form – they’re my notes.

In other news, I also went to Computer Vision, which wasn’t bad. I went to an AI seminar which was almost totally over my head, which made it a bit hard. I was supposed to meet up with Brian to talk about my research options, but he ended up bailing on accounts of he needed to see his lawyer about an accident he was in a little while ago. We’ve rescheduled for Friday, which is about my limit for just telling him to forget it and I won’t do Honours, I’ll just go for a Postgrad Diploma in Science instead.

I went out with Greg and had dinner on the waterfront. Lots of big ships in the distance, lots of little boats in front of us as we had fish and chips. Now, it was hardly the greasy taste of home… the fish were tiny little things and the chips were more like shoestring wedges… it also came with coleslaw, ketchup and tartar sauce. Not greasy at all. Fish was nice, chips were pretty good too but all in all a bit expensive for something that wasn’t particularly filling. Tasty, but not something I think I’ll be having on a regular basis. Greg and I had a look out over the water for a bit and stood by the Lost Fishermen memorial then did a brief tour past some other places he thought I might like that were pretty close to my apartment. Oh, and we went to the supermarket briefly because he needed to pick some stuff up. After that I went back to my office for a little bit and wrote a few things then head back to my apartment, talking to Anastasia as I went. Once back it was time for emails and a bunch of other writing tasks, like writing up some notes from today and that kind of thing. I also did some reading of material that I missed in Graphics yesterday. Looks like I’m going to have a bunch of questions and I’ll need to learn some more technologies/languages on the fly. Ah well.