The Cyborg's Dilemma... Again.

"The Dilemma of Being a Cyborg" is an article by Carina Chocano which recently appeared in the New York Times magazine addressing the growing anxiety that many people face concerning what appears to be universal digitization.  In 1997, Frank Biocca first described the cyborg's dilemma in these terms:

The more natural the interface the more 'human' it is, the more it adapts to the human body and mind.  The more the interface adapts to the human body and mind, the more the body and mind adapts to the non-human interface.  Therefore, the more natural the interface, the more we become 'unnatural,' the more we become cyborgs.

At the TED conference in 2010, Amber Case seized on this theme with her talk, "We're All Cyborgs Now," noting the capacity for digital storage devices to augment memory, cognition and consciousness.  Aside from this, much has been written in the field of Embodied Cognition on the subject of cognitive offloading and how it suggests that the boundaries of our minds may not coincide with the boundaries of our physical brains.

Chocano brings a humanistic perspective to the subject, noting the important role that physical objects have played in establishing context and meaning in her life.  She is leery of the transformation, reduction, and compression of everything into "data" and the increasing dependence most of us have on the volumes of digital information at our fingertips.  Chocano, thus describes her "cyborg's dilemma" in the following way:

We're collectively engaged in a mass conversion of what we used to call, variously, records, accounts, entries, archives, registers, collections, keepsakes, catalogs, testimonies and memories into, simply, data.

Throughout the article, Chocano seems self-critical and conscious of her own reluctance to immediately embrace the digital future, but the reasons for her concern are not without basis.  Her suspicion that access to information is not the same thing as knowledge is supported at length by the work of Nicholas Carr ("Is Google Making Us Stupid?" and The Shallows).  Related to this concern, though perhaps more sinister, is the standardization and accessibility facilitated by digital technology.  In a completely standardized digital world, we don't own our own knowledge.  Our life histories, buying habits, social networks, intellectual labor - indeed our very identities - are swallowed by and subordinated to the metaprograms that beckon us to join, share and participate in this new culture even as we relinguish our control over it.

The Obsolete Classroom?

In a recent item from The Chronicle of Higher Education, Nick DeSantis reports on the plans of Stanford Professor, Sebastian Thrun, to break away from his tenured position and create his own institution: "Udacity" (presumably a clever union of the words "University" and "Audacity").  Thrun apparently believes that the traditional classroom is outdated and should be abandoned for a multi-mediated digital platform where collaboration and group learning replace lectures and note-taking.

The initial response that anyone might have to this is positive.  If new media can help people learn better and faster by appealing to a diverse set of learning styles and unleashing the power of cooperation, why shouldn't it be used.  I fully agree that it should.  The problem comes when we examine the common false-choice fallacy that is frequently associated with new technologies and the cornucopia of remedies promised by those who are their cheerleaders.  In this case, the fact that teaching an exclusively online course doesn't increase, but decreases, the number of communication modalities available is omitted. All of the tools at the disposal of the online instructor are also available to the classroom instructor, plus one: the gold standard of face to face communication.

Smartphones and The Cyborg's Dilemma

In this month's issue of Fast Company, there's an article by Adam Bluestein titled, "As Smartphones Get Smarter, You May Get Healthier: How mHealth Can Bring Cheaper Health Care To All."  M-Health stands for "mobile health," a new trend in helath care technology which takes advantage of the smartphone platform to make expensive medical devices available around the world and on the go for only a fraction of the cost of convensional health care machinary.  For example, Bluestein's article features engineer Ramesh Raskar whose smartphone-based autorefractor takes advantage of the existing display technology to make an ordinarily cost-prohibitive instrument available in poor nations.  The technology cleverly takes advantage of an already existing economy of scale in smartphones.  In addition to Raskar's autorefractor, mobile ultrasounds, electrocardiograms, microscopes, and other applications build off of the display technology, wireless communication, and power supplies of existing smartphone technology.  See Bluestein's diagram below for the full range of innovations:

Amid all of this incredible innovation, there is one line in Bluestein's article that some may find unsettling.  It's a quote from the Chief Innovation Officer at Humana: "It's like a the human body has developed a new organ."  As I considered this, I was reminded of Frank Biocca's famous paper, "The Cyborg's Dilemma," which is described as a sort of paradox in human-machine relations: "The more natural the interface the more 'human' it is, the more it adapts to the human body and mind.  The more the interface adapts to the human body and mind, the more the body and mind adapts to the non-human interface.  Therefore, the more natural the interface, the more we become 'unnatural,' the more we become cyborgs."

Of course, the prospect of becoming a cyborg is significantly less disturbing when one considers the alternative plan.  Nevertheless, it cannot be ignored that this is another critical example of how the intimate connection we have with our tools is in the process of transforming us.

Developing a Professional Identity Through Social Media

A recent article for The Washington Post (1/21) titled  Teachers take to Twitter to improve craft and commiserate discusses the use of Twitter as a tool in sharing lesson plans and classroom challenges among educators.  The author, Emma Brown, writes that [teachers are] "using Twitter to improve their craft by reaching beyond the boundaries of their schools to connect with colleagues across the country and around the world."  And she is not alone in lauding the benefits of social media as a teaching aid.  Some college and university faculty have shunned the learning management software giant, Blackboard, in favor of open source software like WordPress, Blogger, Facebook, and LinkedIn (e.g. Prof. Hacker 3/18/10).

This illustrates a common byproduct of the "speed-up" of information flow facilitated through the Internet.  When individuals join together through a digital collective and exchange information at an accelerated rate, a new dynamic of group identity begins to emerge.  Through social media, all professions have the potential to form self-governing emergent systems which ensure professional integrity, recommend best practices, address collective labor concerns, and evolve through the infinite flux of technological evolution.  The professionalization of social media is evident in the new profession of "social media management" and the increasing importance placed on having a social media presence by corporations, large organizations, and the public relations firms that represent them.

This phenomenon illustrates the development of a collective identity as it is facilitate through the web.  It is a drastically scaled down version of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin's notion of the "Noosphere," Michael Chorost's "World Wide Mind," or the Monism Scenario of simulation detailed in our recent paper (Tele)Presence and Simulation.  The idea is that individual identity is replaced by collective identity through the rapidly accelerated scale of information exchange instantiated by social media.

The Politics of Film in October 2008: Part II: W

Oliver Stone's W (2008) is the second controversial pre-election docu-genre film that I will explore. Although it is inappropriate to classify this film as a documentary, it remains an interesting comparison to Mahr and Charles' Religulous because it uses real footage and accurate re-enactment in attempting to satirize the real by presenting it as faithfully as possible. To clarify using a different example, Tina Fey's rendition of vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin has achieved a similar effect. In each case, the media producers merely hold a mirror up to their object of scorn and allow the results to speak for themselves. Naturally, this is more the case in Fey's Saturday Night Live performance than in Stone's film, because the latter must yield to the constraint of presenting a feature-length drama.

Before delving directly into an analysis of the film's mechanics, I want to direct the reader to the diagram featured on my homepage (http://www.mattsmediaresearch.com/). This diagram is the outcome of an extensive research project investigating film adaptation and is taken from my recently completed dissertation, Found in Translation: Structural and Cognitive Aspects of the Adaptation of Comic Art to Film (Jones, 2008). The theory of adaptation expressed through the diagram is relevant here because it shows the pathways that exist between original source material and adaptation. In this case, the reality of Bush's presidency represents the source material, and Stone's film represents the adaptation.

Looking at the film from the perspective of this General Model of Adaptation (Jones, 2008), we can say that it is a structural adaptation (Jones, 2008) which selects a specific series of events and modifies them through reorganization, condensation, and extrapolation (see http://www.mattsmediaresearch.com/pdfs/FinalDissertation.pdf pgs. 114-116 for definitions). Using this framework, I will now trace the migration and modification of content from source to adaptation in Stone's W.

The foundation of this "adaptation of reality" is the actual events that occurred in the life of George W. Bush. Like any personal history, no matter how recent it is, some aspects are clearer and easier to discern than others. Certainly the least ambiguous aspects of the film are those lifted straight from reality in the form of archival television material. These clips, taken directly from the media contemporary to the events being dramatized, ground the film, no matter how tenuously, in the realm of actuality. The brief television clip of Bill Clinton's victory over the elder Bush, the invasion of Iraq, images of worldwide protests, and the destruction of the Saddam Hussein statue are examples of the infusion of reality into the context of the story. Of course, these scraps of authenticity are quickly modified to fit into the narrative through the context surrounding them. For example, the reality of the Bill Clinton victory as it was presented on television is immediately placed in the service of making a point about the relationship between George W. Bush and his father: As the elder bush weeps softly at his loss, his son gets angry and exclaims that he should have gone all the way and unseated Saddam from power. This troubled father/son relationship and the argument over Iraq are elements that are central to the entire film; however, the seam between reality and fiction is barely detectable because of the credibility lent by the real-life television excerpt.

Beyond these archived images of the recent past, the film also features re-enactments of actual media events. Similar to Tina Fey's performance on Saturday Night Live, humor and criticism are achieved through fidelity, not hyperbole. Two outstanding examples of this technique, as it is used in W, are the press conference where Bush struggles to explain what mistakes were made leading up to the war, and the "Mission Accomplished" photo-op in which Bush lands a fighter jet on an air craft carrier. Both of these scenes augment the real events they portray by recreating them for the film narrative. For one thing, being re-enactments, these scenes do not present a recycled, previously interpreted version of reality the way the television clips described above do. Instead, they serve to remind viewers of key moments that inform the film's perspective on the Bush presidency and comment upon those moments through their reconstruction by presenting the viewer with a slightly different version of events that serve as a prompt for re-examination within the context of the film's narrative. For example, by exploiting cinematic devices such as the close-up shot and montage editing, these scenes are explored in ways that would be impossible if a completely faithful representation or their original media sources were used instead. To illustrate my point, imagine the press conference without close-ups or the "Mission Accomplished" scene without camera movement.

A step further away from the "documentary" quality of the previous examples of archived footage and re-enactments is the dramatization of anecdotal stories that compose the scenes of Bush's youth which are intercut with the first term of his presidency. Depictions of his life as a Yale "frat-boy," his relationship with Laura, and, especially, his relationship with his father, George H. W. Bush, are dramatized based on anecdote and interspliced with the core of story that explores the events surrounding the invasion of Iraq. The most interesting thing about these anecdotal dramatizations is how they form a parallel story to the Bush presidency and, in the process, attempt to lend insight into the psychology of George W. Bush. As in the case of Religulous (Mahr & Charles), parallelism is used to structure the film's plot in the form of an argument. As Manohla Dargis explains: "The story repeatedly shifts between scenes of the younger Bush meandering through his life, and the older Bush navigating through the early stages of the Iraq war. This shuttling across time and space undercuts the drama — the story doesn’t so much build as restlessly circle back — but it puts into visual terms Mr. Stone’s ideas about the present and past being mutually implicated" (New York Times).

One telling example of how parallelism occurs happens when we are witness to Bush's envious response to his father's support of his brother, Jeb, during his campaign for governor. Upon witnessing this exchange, we are left with the impression that much of Bush's motivation is to earn the respect and approval of his father. In light of this, the war is framed as a misplaced attempt to win approval by completing the job his father started. Parallelism, in this respect, is similar to the adaptive operation that I call "reorganization" in the diagram of the general model of adaptation because events are presented in an order that supports the new plot rather than retelling the story in the literal sense.

In addition to reorganizing history in the service of the film's plot, much of the recent past is also omitted. As noted by McCarthy, "Stone and Weiser make no attempt to cover historical bases; major episodes, including political campaigns, business alliances and elections, are completely omitted" (Variety). Cutting to the chase in this way by elimonating extraneous information not directly relevant to the film's central plot is akin to the adaptive operation of "condensation" in which nonessential material is dropped in order to unify the plot. One major example of condensation in W was the omission of the 2000 presedential race against Al Gore and its highly contested outcome.

Finally, some scenes in the film were completely invented, or "extrapolated" for the sake of the plot. Examples include the scene where Bush discovers Jesus after collapsing during a jog, the scene where he dreams of his father sitting in the Oval Office and lecturing him, and all of the scenes of Bush alone in the baseball stadium catching fly balls. As with the extrapolation that occurs in all film adaptations, these scenes serve to stitch the plot together and, in the process, make salient the most important aspects of the story. Take, for instance, the last scene in the film where Bush runs backward to the wall to catch a fly ball just before it disappears, leaving him bewildered in an empty stadium. There is no equivalent of this in reality but the scene works metaphorically, using the disappearing ball to suggest Bush's ultimate lack of control and confusion in the face of the events surrounding him in the wake of the invasion of Iraq.

The Politics of Film in October 2008: Part I: Religulous

Over the next three blog posts, I will be examining three politically charged films released in October, 2008; the month prior to the Presidential Election. These include Religulous (Charles), An Americal Carol (Zucker), and W (Stone). One of these is a documentary, and the other two are narrative films that exploit the reputations of real people.

I begin with the documentary Religulous so that An American Carol and W can be compared more directly as narrative products.

To briefly summarize, Religulous is premised upon comedian and social critic Bill Mahr's quest to understand why people maintain religous faith in the face of overwhelming reasons to doubt. He speaks to leaders and believers in the Christian, Jewish and Muslim communities in order to try to understand their perspectives. At the end of the film, Mahr concludes that religion is dangerous and should be discarded because it will ultimately lead to a self-fulfilling prophecy about the end of the world.

The reader who has seen this film will correctly observe that the previous paragraph of synopsis ignores the fact that Mahr is not really trying to "understand." His mind is obviously made up and he is plumbing the religious leaders, followers, and places of the world for information that will support his position. This is not a new technique, nor is it a dishonest or unethical technique as some might suggest. A film's classification as "documentary" does not mandate a perspective that is fair or unbiased in any way. In the most literal sense, a documentary film documents reality and does not script dialog or stage events for the camera beyond the readily apparant staging of the interview scenario. How that reality is sliced up and reassembled, however, is both a perceptual and ideological task that cannot be avoided anyway. The most obvious evidence of this singular, biased point of view inherent to cinema is that the camera's lens can take on only one perspective. The screen can be split, images can be superimposed and multiple cameras and angles can be employed, but none of this can remedy the basic truth that a camera can only see one thing at a time and that is what the filmmaker chooses to point it at.

Taking full advantage of the power of the medium to focalize events through a single perspective, Charles and Mahr employ several techniques in promoting their anti-religious message. These include "gatekeeping," "reflexivity," "parallelism," "cutaways," and "verite."

Gatekeeping is the most obvious of this or any other documentary's modus operandi. Those interview segments, scenes, and lines of dialog that work in the favor of the documentary's perspective are kept and those that work against it are discarded. Naturally, having seen only the theatrical release of the film, I have no direct evidence that gatekeeping has occured, but it is safe to assume that much footage was discarded in order to arrive at the final product, and that some of the footage may have contained parts that were less than perfect in terms of the film's goal.

The second strategy is actually quite related to the first. Reflexivity attempts to reconstitute some of the context that the viewer knows is missing. Charles and Mahr achieve reflexivity through personal reflections that Mahr offers as the crew moves from location to location. He speaks about is family history and his personal experiences in such a way as to reveal his honest doubts and his motives for doing what he's doing. In this sense he is quite transparent about his perspective and this compensates for the necessary lack of transparency in the filmmaking process.

Paralellism is the third strategy and it is an old technique in both literature and filmmaking. To understand it, one must grasp the difference between story and plot. While the plot is the sequence of events depicted in the film, the story is the sequence of events as they occur naturally in the story that the film tells. The classic example is Citizen Kane's use of Thompson's investigation (plot) to structure the events of Kane's life (story). Using this perspective, I would say that Religulous is "all plot" and is structured more like an essay because it is guided by the logical relationships between ideas rather than the temporal relationships between events. Once again, Charles and Mahr use this to full effect, returning to various interviews repeatedly to remind the viewer of themes emerging among religious responses. For example, in one sequence, the filmmakers revisit virtually ever previous interview to make the point that religion actively promotes and seeks out the "day of judgement" when the world will end.

The most obvious technique employed throughout the film is the cutaway and it is most often inserted during the interview segments to undermine or contradict the factual incorrectness of the interviewee. Michael Moore famously used this technique in Bowling for Columbine during an interview with a Lockheed Martin spokesman trying to claim that the United States uses its weapons only against aggressors. The film then cuts away to a sampling of half a dozen instances to the contrary. Cutaways were used for similar effect in Religulous, such as the instance where a "formerly" gay minister claims that there is no such thing as a "gay gene" just before we cut to a breif interview of Mahr meeting with the scientist who discovered the "gay gene." More commonly, however, Religulous employs the cutaway for comic effect and to guide the emotional response of the viewer. For example, when suggesting that the reason the bible skips the first 30 years of Jesus' life because he had an awkward adolescence, the film cuts to a shot of Jonah Hill from the film Superbad (2007). In numerous other examples, old educational films and classic hollywood cinema (e.g. The Ten Commandments) are used to similar effect.

The final technique I will discuss this entry is "verite" and it refers to those parts of the film that were unexpected and stand outside of the director or interviewer's control. Examples include a parishioner of the "trucker's church" threatening Mahr and walking out of the interview, Mahr being thrown out of the Vatican, and various other points when religious figures get agitated with Mahr's presence. The effect of including these scenes is to stand back and let the viewers observe, as objectively as possible, the craziness, defensiveness, anger, paranoia, and general misbehavior of those under scrutiny. To illustrate, merely watching Jose Luis de Jesus Miranda to speak calls his sanity into question.

Part V: People

People magazine is to The Atlantic or The New Yorker in terms of "sophistication" what The Weekly Standard is to Mother Jones in terms political bias.

As a "low-brow" cultural artifact, People is dedicated to celebrity gossip and human interest stories. We should be aware, however, that focusing on human interest stories above issues does not make People apolitical. In fact, in the current climate that thrives on identity-politics, People may (unfortunately) be dealing with the core issues upon which the upcoming election will be based. This being the case, a brief look at the cover story is in order.

The first thing that is striking about this cover is the arrangement of the members of the McCain family. They are divided by gender and by race. The men are at the top of the image, followed by the women in the second tier, and Bridgette McCain is at the bottom left of the image.

It is difficult to read this image in a way that is not hierarchical. Even if one were to say that Bridgette is located at the bottom left due to being the youngest, this does not account for the gender segregation or the fact that Cindy McCain is older than everyone above her except for the Senator. Given that framework, even the sympathetic onlooker cannot deny the potentially sexist/racist underpinnings of the portrait.

To make the point even clearer, a quantitative analysis of the distances between family memebers reveals that Bridgette is mathematically the furthest away from any other family member in the portrait (see right). And the point is underscored by the two-page spread within the magazine which has Bridgette sitting on the floor in front of the couch while the rest of the family is either seated or standing above.


This gives her the disturbing appearance of being a sort of "family pet," but it is doubtful this is the true subtext of the message. It is far more likely that Bridgette is being used as a prop to demonstrate the humanitarian qualities of the McCains, particularly Cindy. Moving on to the next image in the article, this becomes very clear as we are offered an overt image of Cindy in Cambodia doing work for CARE and Operation Smile.

The title above, "Her Mission of Mercy," not only frames Cindy as a selfless philanthropist, it seems to portray her as being on a mission from God and lend her significant symbolic value from the woman whose pose she is adopting in the photograph...

While it would be unacceptable to compare a billion-dollar beer fortune heiress to the late Mother Tereasa using words, images that contain suggestive poses are capable of the subtlety necessary to do the trick.

For People magazine and its readers, it isn't the candidates' policies or positions that are important, it is how the reader feels about the candidate as a person. This is what distinguishes it from the other publications in this five part analysis. Unlike Mother Jones or The Weekly Standard, People makes no arguments or claims that can be refuted. They present images that can be critiqued as I have done above, but the ambiguity inherent to images and stories about personal qualities deflects criticism and slips under the critical radar to strike the reader at the level of emotion.