Can digital communication be real communication?

This question has been on my mind for awhile.  I have written about it in myriad ways, from my course readings of Dick, McLuhan, Turkle and Baudrillard to my own personal discomfort with online interactions.  Through all of these posts, one thing remains as tough to solve for me as proving the Reimann Hypothesis: is the nature of digital communication defined foremost by its "digital-ness" or do personal tendencies have a defining role in digital communication?  Let me try to say it better: Are digital communications for extroverted and introverted people equally at risk for being shallow simply because the communication is digital?

A Temporary Stop ...

I have come to a stopping point for my Google Sites and coding exploration. My goal has been to create a class site for my high school freshmen on Google Sites with CSS coding within the pages to personalize them. My students will use this site throughout next year to share work with each other and a larger audience (for example, they will present original poems and recorded recitations of them) and to complete group projects (for example, they will work with partners to research and create a page on the site about a Holocaust topic).

Striking Out on My Own (New Media Project Proposal)

Rhetorical Situation

My goal is to create a class site for my high school freshmen on Google Sites with CSS coding within the pages to personalize them.  My students will use this site throughout the year to share work with each other and a larger audience (for example, they will present original poems and recorded recitations of them) and to complete group projects (for example, they will work with partners to research and create a page on the site about a Holocaust topic).  I will also research the implications of FERPA for an online classroom for minors.

Children Dream of Electric Furbies (Reading, Thinking, and Reflecting #7)

The Gray Furby

Alone Together, Chapters 1-6:

As I move deeper into this course, I am finding the connections fascinating.  I was assigned to read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, I got my second choice when I read Understanding Media, and I am now reading my first choice, Alone Together. None of these were assigned to me or selected by me with any thought to the others, yet they fit into a thought-provoking single picture of our current society.

Baudrillard, McLuhan, and Bolter ... oh my!

My fascinating reading for this morning comes from: Diane, Suzanne, Sarah, and Jennifer. 

The physical remediation so prevalent in our society and laid out with incredible visual power in Diane's post really had me thinking about the struggles of women to meet the unrealistic expectations of beauty in our society ... and who knew I was channeling Baudrillard as I thought about this! Suzanne and Sarah explain well Baudrillard's concept of simulcra, and I was struck most by his point that society has gotten to where the real and the simulated can no longer be distinguished.  At its most basic level, this is speaking to the women's magazines Diane writes of and the video on plastic surgery she shares.  When a reader of Cosmo feels she needs to look like the models, she is seeking to make a simulcrum into a reality ... and the damage that comes with such an effort is enormous. Sarah and Jennifer then offer the final link in today's cycle of thoughts -- McLuhan's thoughts on how media affect messages.

CSS Exploration #3

As I am in the midst of understanding CSS vocabulary and not yet done, I need to stop and let these foundational terms sink in before I go further. Here is my key terms list for today (all taken from the Mozilla CSS tutorial site):

Exploring Blogs

Responses to first part of Lingua Fracta:
- Cheri Lemieux Spiegel's post
- Diane Cooke's post

Responses to finishing Lingua Fracta:
- Eric Sentell's post
- Mat Reynold's post





My partner in the canonical book assignment (McLuhan's Understanding Media):
- Jennifer Buckner's post
- (Reading Eric's post above and seeing that he was also reading McLuhan led me to read his McLuhan post ... so I have two on three topics versus three on two topics. Hope that is okay ...) Eric Sentell's post

Reading, Thinking, and Reflecting #6

 My Book ... Too Full of Ideas to Contain! 

Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, chapters 12-22 and chapters 22-33:One of McLuhan's running themes is the difference between tribal and literate societies. I have been tracking this thread ...

- "Literacy creates very much simpler kinds of people than those that develop in the complex web of ordinary tribal and oral societies. For the fragmented man creates the homogenized Western world, while oral societies are made up of people differentiated, not by their specialist skills or visible marks, but by their unique emotional mixes. The oral man's inner world is a tangle of complex emotions and feelings that the Western practical man has long ago eroded or suppressed within himself in the interest of efficiency and practicality" (75).

Reading, Thinking, and Reflecting #5

Understanding Media: The Extensions of ManChapters 1-11:
Marshall McLuhan ... "McLuhan wrote with no knowledge of galvanic skin response technology, terminal node controllers, or the Apple Newton. He might not have been able even to imagine what a biomouse is. But he pointed the way to understanding all of these, not in themselves, but in their relation to each other, to older technologies, and above all in relation to ourselves our bodies, our physical senses, our psychic balance. When he published Understanding Media in 1964, he was disturbed about mankind’s shuffling toward the twenty-first century in the shackles of nineteenth century perceptions. He might be no less disturbed today. And he would continue to issue the challenge that confronts the reader at every page of his writings to cast off those shackles" (Gordon).

Reading, Thinking, and Reflecting #4

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, chapters 16-22:

"Because without the Mercerism experience we just have your word that you feel this empathy business, this shared, group thing" (209-210).

After our 1/23 class when Dr. Rodrigo shared that one reason we are reading this book is to think about empathy as we study new media, I have found myself pondering this idea even more. When I first wrote about empathy, I was thinking about whether digital networks can ever replicate the empathy drawn from physical proximity that underlies non-digital social networks. Dick wrote (see above quote) that empathy will always be the divider between human and android -- which makes me think about whether humans can ever find full empathy through digital connections. Does the inherent lack of empathy in something digital create a barrier to the conveyance of human empathy across digital channels? Dick's empathy box does generate human empathy across its technology -- is this something possible outside of science fiction?