From our conversation Thursday on randomness and it's impact on life, I'm still not convinced that it really matters.  Regardless of whether or not our lives are completely determined, we'll never know, so why even talk about it?  We can answer this by saying that it's more comfortable to know that we have a purpose or that we don't have a purpose, but the thing is that we'll never know.  Why not just drop the conversation all together.  For those who want to think they have control then that's what they'll believe and those who like things determined will believe that.  Then you will have the group of people who don't really think about it, and they won't be forced into a conversation.

 Our group's idea for teaching Conceiving Ada is to divide the class into small groups and assign certain scenes from the movie that we thought raised interesting ideas to each group and have them re create and film the scene from their own interpretation. "Re- create" would be used very loosely allowing students as much freedom as possible when making their own scene. We thought it a useful exercise when trying to understand a movie to actually try to make one yourself. This idea was inspired by Hayles' critique of critique and call for generating knowledge. Instead of critiquing the movie we would like students to generate their own little movies using themes and questions raised by the film.

Notes for 2.23 follow, but you have to click to read them.

 On Tuesday's class, Professor Grobstein mentioned a couple of interesting NYTimes articles. One of them discussed the "threatening scent of fertile women" and the other, "A Romp Through Theories of the Cradle of Life" talks about the theories of the origins of life. This article in particular struck me as very interesting - not only does it challenge Darwin's conceived thoughts, but it also brings me back to Dennett's book.

Our group (vgaffney, izemmahi, and I) came up with several ideas for using Hayles's ideas to teach the movie Conceiving Ada. The first topic we discussed was posthuman scholarship. We thought that a “posthuman” mode of scholarship might look more like the depiction in the film of Emmy's obsession with Ada – scholars learning with technology and using new tools to alter the ways in which they learn. We then touched upon how the film encourages us to forget meaning by giving us a somewhat confusing narrative that requires us to ignore the smaller details in order to appreciate the larger, intellectually useful themes.

I am continuously amazed and convinced by the importance of technology and hyper reading. I really do think that Technology has become an extension of us, more like part of us, as if we're reaching out to outer space, to improve, to expand, to reach for the best and we rely on Technology to do that. Just like rubickscube said, the world wide web has enabled us to communicate in ways never thought of before. Tim Berneres-Lee showed us the initial intention of the web, to communicate and reachout to people, sharing information and creating that sense of community across the world. My mind and the way I think are becoming more and more technology-like, hyper reading, e-mailing, blogging, skyping and connecting with people from over the seas.

In discussing the film Conceiving Ada, our group initially had difficulty finding something coherent to focus on in the film and coming up with a way to teach it. As already noted by many of our classmates, we found the scientific/realistic inconsistencies and the questionable morals of the main character's choices off-putting and distracting. However, we eventually decided that it would be interesting to focus on the questions the film raised about what constitutes life or the self and the idea of a 'medium' in the film by looking at the relationships between the virtual/artificial and reality.

 In the film and in our readings one theme kept reappearing, the quest for greater transparency in the exchange of information.  Each new form of communication comes with the promise of less filtering through experts and greater access to aggregate data and facts.  The internet seems to fulfill that promise.  We disassemble the world around us into disconnected facts and images and make them searchable.  But ultimately, to sift through the amount of information, to make meaning of it, we must rely on new filters.  New filters would include individual search criteria, a primary site that gathers and presents you with information it thinks you want, or another person's summary.

When teaching Conceiving Ada, one might want to consider the ways in which reading the information or "data streams" that are transfered and the most effective ways to draw those meanings from the movie. Focusing on specific scenes in the movie are rather futile as the movie challenges the ways in which typical narration is presented in film. In order to understand the movie, it is most effective to practice the distant reading Hayles described.