As we get into our third week, we start to get material that talks about what makes us human and what it means to be human. Just from watching the videos so far, there's already a lot for me to be thinking about. Including how I want to apply this to the classroom when I get one.
There's going to be some spoilers in here, so if you don't want to know what happens in the videos, don't read yet.
All four of the film festival films give different interpretations of the idea of humanity. In the Toyota and BT ads, they try to present the use of technology as a way for us to make more human connections or find ways to regain our humanity. In "World Builder," a programmer uses technology as a way to create an artificial world for his wife/girlfriend in a coma as a way to "connect" with her. And in "They're Made of Meat," it shows a different take on humanity in that to alien eyes, we are just big pieces of meat with brains.
What we have to remember is that in advertising, they are trying to sell us a product. In the case of the two ads, they're trying to sell us on the idea that we've lost our "human" capacity for nature or contact, so we need their technology to help us get that back. It almost seems counterintuitive when you look into it -- what will bring us back from the overload of technology? MORE TECHNOLOGY! The Toyota ad in particular shows us a fictionalized world where everyone is a character in a video game world, and humanity has been almost completely lost (only with their product, of course, can we break free from this technology overload and be "human" again).
The BT ad is probably a more realistic version of today's world, in which we have this tendency to talk to each other via computer and other devices, but don't really "talk" to each other. Of course, it has somewhat the same message -- what will bring us back to contact with humans? MORE TECHNOLOGY! I know that as educators we experience this in our classrooms sometimes, where students are more interested in texting each other on their cell phones than talking to each other about stuff (even after we tell them to put the phones away!). I know that because my family tends to be fairly far from me I can't help but use the tech to talk with them sometimes. And being somewhat of a shy person in groups and classrooms (except when I'm teaching or performing -- it's really weird that I feel more comfortable giving a presentation than I do being on the other end of it), I find technology the best way that I can communicate sometimes.
In "World Builder," I felt that the presentation of creating an artificial world was touching in the context of the story, but to what degrees do we do that now? If you play games like "The Sims" or "Minecraft," you are creating a different, artificial world. Of course, in a game like "The Sims" you are more "God-like" as the user -- you only really get to interact with the avatar you create. In "Minecraft" there's a means to an end -- you build a house to keep yourself safe from "Creepers." When you play a game like "World of Warcraft," you are entering a pre-constructed world that you get to explore for better or worse. Later this year, I'll be taking the Coursera course "Online Games: Literature, New Media, and Narrative," where as one of the requirements of the course we were to start an account on "Lord of the Rings Online," an online game where to get to explore the world of the J.R.R. Tolkien books. But I think that digital simulations can only go so far -- as humans, we will always know that it is a digital simulation, no matter how realistic it might be. There will always be a clue in there that will tell us that something is not "real" in our minds.
"They're Made Out of Meat" is an interesting little film. But I don't think the fact that we are made out of meat can classify the idea of us being "human." This movie is sticking with me for some reason, but the film "Warm Bodies" has a lot of characters that are "made out of meat," but half of them aren't "human." What makes us human is our emotions, our feelings, the fact that we can think for ourselves and have free will on what happens to us. And the film explores that in the course of the story as one of the zombies finds himself becoming more human as the story progresses.
What a lot of these utopian/dystopian views of technology forget to take into account is that you still need a human to run them, and that is what makes them fallible. They can't think for themselves, that's what makes them machines. We have the capacity of thought, that's what makes us human.
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