Digital lives

digital lives how technology, virtuality and science are changing us november 2014 issue # 0

s ev i l l a t i g i d

editor’s notes This is the issue #0 of the new magazine “Digital Lives“ that I projected as final assignment for the Coursera MOOC “E-learning and Digital Cultures“ of the University of Edinburgh.

I chose the format of electronic magazine downloadable and readable offline with tablet and computer. I think that the articles displayed in this way are more suitable to reflection compared to the publications in a blog that allows, in general, a reading too fast and shallow. Of course, there are links to some online resources to deepening. I collected in these pages four articles that I have published in the course of the EDC Mooc Forum and concerning my thoughts on some of the topics suggested in the lessons of these weeks.

Our lives are undergoing a change due to the increasingly rapid advance of technologies including digital ones. The field of online learning, particularly, both in education and in corporate training, is one in which the changing of the habits are greater. The media and the traditional methods, paper books, classes with students and teachers physically present are leaving more and more the place to digital media on which to study and be updated, ebook, computer, tablet, interactive and multimedia content, and virtual classrooms with hundreds of people with teachers in distance that are also supported by automatic systems for the evaluation.

All of this develops greater interaction, even if virtual, between people involved in education or professional updating. The costs for participants are reduced and there is not the need for physical travels or defined schedules.

The advantages of e-learning are many and obvious but in contrast we have to deal with the limitations of virtuality and communications technology.

It is always present the risk of the information overload that can lead to a shallow learning because it does not allow the deepening.

Another difficulty is the so-called “digital divide” for which not all people can benefit yet in the same way of communication technologies for economic and social reasons mainly.

Furthermore, scientists are realizing that the virtuality changes the way in which we deal with real life. For example reading on electronic media such as tablet or computers leads us to have a short attention span for a few lines of text while images and video capture and distract us, as well as hyperlinks take us away easily from the page we were looking at. Change accordingly the way of writing, faster and perhaps less thoughtful using the keyboard of a computer than using a pen on paper.

It was shown that this lack of contact with the physical medium also has consequences about memory, we are increasingly distracted and we remember with more difficulty.

It is also interesting to analyze what are the cultural impacts in a world increasingly globally connected and what are the limits that still exist and how to overcome them.

Cristina Fois “E-learning and Digital Cultures” - EDCMOOC page of The University of Edinburgh. https://www.coursera.org/course/edc

co n t a ct s LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/koloree Issuu http://www.issuu.com/08168 Behance http://www.behance.net/koloree_lab Web Site http://www.koloree.com E-mail koloree.com@gmail.com

Copyright Notes © Cristina Fois: texts, concept, graphic cover, magazine design. © Other Authors: images and screenshots of films and movies in the articles belong to their own authors

contents

Utopia “and� Dystopia

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Future lives without bodies?

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World Builder for love

10-11

How to be or not to be Human

12-13

utopia “and” dystopia I would like to give my contribution to the debate about Utopia and Dystopia in Technology by contrasting the two concepts as faces of the same coin.

Often the debates concerning the use of technology in society take for granted that all people without exception have access to the same technology. In fact, today as in the past, not all Human Beings have benefited in the same way many of the technological innovations rather not use them at all.

Just think about the "digital divide" in the Communications Technologies. The Internet network has been existed for 23 years (The World Wide Web was released on the Internet in 1991) and although you can of course say that it is a mass phenomenon and a technological progress, indeed it is not for everyone in the world in the same way. In fact there are many people who do not have access to it not at all or in a limited way.

The discriminants, in the case of connections through the Internet, but the same concept also applies to access to all the other innovations and technological advantages, that we may summarize are essentially three: • Political reasons (eg. in China, where the Internet is censored and controlled as well as in other situations in the World) • Reasons of extreme poverty and geographic isolation (eg. in large parts of Africa) • Social and economic exclusion and “pockets of poverty” also in the so-called rich countries.

There is a great tension and demand for access in egalitarian way to the benefits of the modern society but, in contrast, there are also negative aspects of other technologies used to destroy, the one used for the wars.

The technologies used to make weapons of mass destruction are becoming more affordable for all Countries, also the most unstable and to the international terrorist organizations.

What I think is that the two concepts Utopia and Dystopia have always lived together and that the one can not exists without the other.

This shared reality between the two aspects of technology makes me think about a recent movie, Elysium, which tells the story of a future society where the human population is divided, not equally, between those who have access to all the incredible innovations that allow them a good life and cures for diseases and disabilities and those who suffer the technology only as an instrument of exploitation.

The lucky ones are the rich who live in a beautiful and autonomous space station orbiting around the Earth as a second satellite. The poor, the majority of humans, instead are relegated on an Earth degraded, violent and polluted and exploited by the wealthy inhabitants of Elysium as under-

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Images from film Elysium (2013) Watch the official trailer on YouTube

paid slaves, engaged in hazardous work; the poor do not have access to any of the technology nor have access to the life-saving treatment.

This utopian/dystopian system goes phut when a group of poor people on Earth, decide to take the machines that treat diseases, they succeed in overcome the security measures and embark on a ship leaving for Elysium. The revolt will be bloody for the inhabitants of Elysium which will eventually have to give in and make innovations available to all, rich and poor equally.

In this story with interchangeable plans there are various elements of debate and questions, including: • The concepts of Utopia and Dystopia are themselves related concepts, eg. the Technology can be dystopian for the sufferer but utopian instead for those who use it to his advantage • Access to technology is an inalienable right? It should be recognized to every human being the right to have easy access to innovations as well as the best medical cares? Who should pay to ensure that the socially and/ or the economically disadvantaged persons may access to innovation? The respective Governments or a Supranational Organization?

• The problem is social as well as ethical, too: • money = technological innovations = advantages • poverty = automatic social exclusion = exclusion from the technological benefits = more social and political instability within Countries

Images from film Elysium (2013) Watch the official trailer on YouTube

I believe that the request for access to innovations, which comes from below, from all of us as individuals, can not be stopped for economic reasons. Maybe it will be this the next revolution after the last, the invention of the Net: a social revolution that will make obsolete the current concept of wealth related to money.

R e s ource s Elysium Official Extended Trailer (2013) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vSAS79fBVxs Utopia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utopia Dystopia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dystopia Utopian and dystopian fiction http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utopian_and_dystopian_fiction Digital Divide http://www.internetworldstats.com/links10.htm http://www.icahdq.org/conf/2014/aroundtheworldcfp.asp

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Future lives without bodies?

The movies proposed in EDC Course made me reflect about the relationship that we have with our bodies in an age increasingly technological. We are forgetting that the human being to feel good needs to experience materially as well as thinking and to make things also manually better when interacting with others.

A Day Made of Glass 2 It is the most utopian movie of the four proposed but even though the technology is very obiquitous human relations seem not being compromised, on the contrary persons interact more and better than today. Learning through virtual reality seems engaging but a bit aseptic. Perhaps in that future, to be really utopian, people and students would make also real things, I mean manually like the model of the bridge shown in the second movie.

Bridging our Future This movie shows a very near future almost today present. Students learn and project virtually but experiment making something manually.

They make the assembling of the pieces of the bridge after having printed them with a 3D printer. Learning in this way I think is optimal for our times.

A Digital Tomorrow This video is sad and ironic at the same time. People interact each other face to face but are also busy with the necessity of their technological devices like recharge a smarphone with a gesture. There are too many gestures in that future, people are slaves of them and seem almost schizophrenic. It is our dystopic present not a next future (I hope).

Sight The last movie represents an alienating future, dystopic future, all life based on game apps, all human interactions based on game scores. Game, game, game until the social death! More than the future, I hope not, it is the present for many people engaged in pervasive online and offline games for several hours a day. They are slaves of other people who make money on their addiction.

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Images from movie “A day made of glass 2�

Watch the official trailer on YouTube

Images from movie “Bridging our Future” Watch the movie on YouTube

R e s ource s

A Day Made of Glass 2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZkHpNnXLB0 Bridging our Future http://youtu.be/BYMd-7Ng9Y8 A Digital Tomorrow http://vimeo.com/48204264 Sight https://vimeo.com/46304267 Metaphors of the Internet http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2370/2158

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World builder for love This beautiful movie, “World Builder”, deals with at least two current issues: if there is a residue of consciousness in a person in deep coma and if it is ethical to allow the possibility, in future, to use technology to communicate with patient.

The first is a very sensitive issue, that of being able to determine when a person that is in a deep coma is clinically dead. Also if a residue of consciousness may be considered as life even if the body without the help of the machines could not live.

The other issue that the film deals with is the influence of technology on human emotions of sadness, memory, tenderness and love and it is enough unusual.

The topic is very sad: a man in love creates a virtual world for a woman who is in a coma in a hospital bed. The technology is so advanced that it allows not only to create a realistic world full of details and even perfumes but also to allow a form of communication with a woman in a coma.

Perhaps it is more amazing and touching the fact to communicate with person nearly clinically dead rather than the fact to build a virtual road with buildings and flower beds.

Being able to communicate to a different level from the normal thanks to the virtual reality would be a great advancement but also a very heartbreaking thing. In this case, however, the emotions of sadness for the destiny and the inevitability of fate of the woman are amplified. In a situation like his in our days, for the family of a patient in a coma there is the acceptance of the resignation and then of his natural destiny.

This elaboration of the mourning in a technological reality as the one described in the movie should instead be postponed indefinitely by increasing the pain of the family and of the patient himself who seems to have some sort of conscience even if weak.

It makes me think whether it is ethical to allow this possibility. By the very fact that it is technologically practicable it is not said it is desirable. It would be too heartbreaking to communicate with a person who is as dead.

Why do it? Maybe for selfishness, for having the person still somehow close.

It is human.

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Images from movie “World Builder” Watch the film on YouTube

The issue, however, could also be observed from another point of view.The consciousness of the woman, even if faint, still exists. She can walk in the world created from her beloved, to smell flower that he has shaped, surprised for the sunlight reflecting on the windows of the buildings.

She knows that everything has been created for her and she is able to still have emotions including sadness when at the end of the walk comes back in through the door from which she came, that is she falls again within its state of coma.

The movie tells us that as long as there is consciousness there is also life, even if the body is connected to the machines to survive.

Images from movie “World Builder�

Watch the film on YouTube

R e s ource s

World builder https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VzFpg271sm8 Technology can have positive and negative impact on social interactions http://www.humankinetics.com/excerpts/excerpts/technology-can-have-positive-and-negative-impact-on-social-interactions Technology-aided programs for post-coma patients http://journal.frontiersin.org/Journal/10.3389/fnhum.2014.00931/abstract

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How to be or not to be Human?

The human being is a sentient “biological machine�, with thoughts and feelings, but what really defines us as Human Beings? This human essence, if in the future it will be technically possible, will besomehow attributed also to artificial beings?

The main character of the movie is an actress robot, Gumdrop, who takes part in an audition for a movie.

Her interview astonishes us because it looks human, not in appearance that is clearly artificial but for the fact that she has a consciousness, feelings, memories and values.

The film tells us that her humanity is all in her sentient being as a human being regardless from having a body of flesh and bone or not.

Gumdrop is an interesting movie because it propels us into a future in which human characteristics will be extended to other forms of artificial life be they machines or the result of genetic engineering, and all this will seem quite normal.

In such a future, not necessarily dystopian, what really distinguish a Human Being from an Artificial Being?

In other words, the essence of our humanity lies in our consciousness or in our human body?

Can a robot be considered human if it has human consciousness and human behavior?

Likewise, will a Human Being be considered less human if in the future may have implanted very advanced prosthesis but nevertheless artificial? A humanized robots will have the same rights as a Human Being?

All these are questions to which we are not yet able to answer in defined terms and somehow reminiscent of a dilemma that had the ancients who, not knowing yet the functions of the brain as we know it today, thought that the seat of emotions and feelings was the heart.

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Images from movie Gumdrop Watch on YouTube

Images from movie Gumdrop Watch on YouTube

R e s ource s

Gumdrop https://youtu.be/A7sjoI5QjBY Human enhancement, robots, and the fight for human rights http://www.fidis.net/resources/identity-use-cases-scenarios/human-enhancement-robots-andthe-fight-for-human-rights/ How bionic technology will change what it means to be human http://www.vox.com/2014/11/11/7175455/cyborg-ethics-moreno

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