Did not get nearly enough sleep, so I was a bit late to my Digital Culture lecture. However I didn’t appear to miss much, as the speaker was talking about security in a way that a lot of the stuff he was talking about I already knew, so that may have been alright that I was a bit late. From there we went on to photography and the implications of digital manipulation.

One interesting point that was raised was the level of responsibility associated with being able to manipulate images. The question that one of my classmates posed was, who in the room would be comfortable Photoshopping an image such that it could be used as evidence in a murder (removing the moral implications, of course). Oddly, I was. Weird kind of a feeling, actually.

Another interesting part about that particular class was that Terry, our professor, was searching around for some kind of educational landmarks for us to recognise. He was asking us for profundities, for specific commentaries about Digital Culture that we have gleaned during his course. This is what I contributed, which he subsequently posted on the course webpage:

Our ability to manipulate images is greater than our ability to perceive manipulations in images.

The idea that ‘Digital Culture’ is really about the greater availability of information, technologies and the impact they have on the behavioral patterns of society as a whole – it drives a need for the ‘culture’ to adopt a greater level of discernment. This can be illustrated as a general trend through emerging information technologies as people learn to disregard or perceive what is more meaningful or relevant to them: do not take notice of ‘trash’ novels or tabloids raving about aliens; do not watch the commercials on television or the melodramas about prepubescents; do not click on the pop-up advertisements or the search engine results that are not what you’re looking for. In the same way, when presented with numerous photographs and asked to discern which is the ‘real’ one, society is still playing catch-up to the wide-spread adoption of image manipulation technology.

Some other contributions from the class:

Adam Hindman: The things that people do in a digital culture are not new. However, the fact that digital culture allows many more people to do them much more easily means that unprecedented effects are produced. Quantitative change results in qualitative change.

Travis Kriplean (the other Computer Scientist in the class): The use of digital technologies is facilitating the generation of extremely precise, searchable, mineable, and archivable data–now, more than ever, we have to discriminate between not just too little, but also too much data: we need to understand and find meaning in excessive information. How do we come to ignore, what do we ignore, and when? The need becomes more pronounced the more detailed our quantifications become.

Past that I did some work, went to the FIUTS lunch, all that jazz. I went bowling again with the CSE people in the social league again. It’s good fun and I get to chat with other people a bit more. Anna and I aren’t doing very well score-wise, but that’s not really the point – it’s still good fun. Also, while I was there one of the girls in the lane next to us complimented me on my hair. ^^ That was a nice feeling.

Back at the office I looked over some work stuff, wrote a bunch of emails and generally felt pretty bad and not confident about my current assignments’ completion.

I went back to my apartment and got some dinner, went to bed early but it didn’t make much difference as I still couldn’t get to sleep for ages.