After getting past some of the general difficulties I had with Conceiving Ada, I tried to get past the far-fetched idea of the movie and think about how gender roles functioned within it.  For Ada, having children is a full-time job, something that as a woman, must take over her life and stop her from pursuing her own goals.  Similarly, Emmy's pregnancy frightens her at first and from looking at her life with her boyfriend, it seems clear that her work comes before any personal relationships do.  In a way, her daughter becomes her work because she is a clone of Ada, another "experiment" for Emmy to explore.

When we were in groups trying to link the articles to the movie, we ran into some trouble near the end questions, about how we would teach it using Hayles’ ideas.

After reading How we Read, I have been fascinated by the ability of technology to effect the workings of our brains. They say that video games and search engines create and strengthen neural pathways and potentially weaken old ones. But doesn't this sound a bit scary? It suggests that the structure of our brain is physically being changed by technology!

There was one study conducted at Harvard university in which people without prior experience playing the piano were separated into 3 groups. One group had intense piano lessons for 5 days.  There was a second control group who did nothing. The third group, however, was taken into the room with the piano and told to "imagine" they were getting lessons and being instructed…

 People always talk about “The Good Old Days”- the days without internet, when life was simple and easy. But what, really, was so great about those days?

 As an English major at Haverford, I’ve found Hayles’ two articles to be particularly interesting. The idea of transforming/altering humanitarian disciplines in order to transition into a more digitized humanities is something I’m still not sure I entirely support. I think that both close reading and hyper reading are important—both are legitimate avenues to critical thinking. As someone who spends the majority of my time bogged down by close reading hundreds of pages per week, I realize the advantage, and, in fact, the necessity, of developing the skill of hyper-reading. That being said, I’ve made a point to do all the readings for this class primarily online.

 After watching and discussing Conceiving Ada all I could think about was obsession. Emmy was pretty obsessed with Ada, let's be honest. She was fascinated with her life, and her influence on technology as we know it, so much so that Emmy ended up literally conceiving Ada, giving birth to a "reincarnation" of her or however you'd like to phrase it. Taking a step back, I found myself comparing Emmy's "obsession" with Ada to technology addiction today. Many scientists are suggesting that the addiction to technology is an actual psychological disorder, not just a social problem. 

So this week I'm supposed to post information about the historical or contemporary difference(s) technology makes. Well…. This week’s discussion of Conceiving Ada was interesting. I was pleasantly surprised that the class picked up on different aspects of the movie. Our minds are trained to think in such various ways that I do not why I’m surprised when people don’t think like me and vice versa. It’s funny how some of us had expectations based on what we wanted to see versus being open to interpreting the movie entirely, whether based on our training our academic expertise or not.