Month: April 2017

The movie Momento caught me completely off guard. At first I thought I was the one that was forgetting some of the scenes and that’s why I could not figure out what was happening but then I realized that as professor Drexler explained, the movie actually started with the end of the “story” and just kept on going back in flashbacks. The movie clearly demonstrated our reliance in our memory in order to function as human beings. Leonard suffers of memory loss and it is not able to create short-term memories yet somehow he can still remember what happened to his wife and why he wants to find and murder the guy who raped her. It must be so hard for people in today’s world that suffer from similar things and must rely in pictures, surroundings, and even in the case of Lenny’s tattoos in order to function as normal people and have a sense in life. I think overall it was hard to follow because of the hapax, but I think the directors did a really good job in trying to differentiate the moments in time using black/white and color scenes indicating the past and the present, as well as going back every once in a while to the same scenes and just adding a little bit more to complete them and produce kind of a sequence to it. I think the directors appealed to our way of making sense of things since they distorted the sequence of the movie so we could figure out what was the movie about. At the end, I couldn’t still 100% agree with whether Lenny was innocent and what happened to his wife was actually true or if he was indeed Sammy Jenkins. I know that we are just starting to talk about the importance memory plays not only in computers and hard-drives but in humans too but it is interesting to note how all these materials we have explored so far really point out the importance memory plays in us although we don’t think about that often.

We finished discussing Starts in My Pockets and it was interesting to note how the novel ends with Marq and Rat being separated because they couldn’t be together if they wanted to avoid a cultural fuge. The novel itself was very interesting to read because it involves travel between various worlds and explores diverse cultures instilling in readers travel of mind and heart as well as body in a sense. I think Delany did a great job exploring cross-cultural and cross-racial themes depicting a novel were the ordinary seems abnormal for our society nowadays. He promotes relationships among different sexes, races, cultures, and uses symbolisms such as the family and the syng to defy what on Earth seems to continue to face social obstacles. Delany pictures the family as the group in our society that strongly objects the relationship among interspecies (in our case gays), and the syng as the group concerned not with gender or species but rather on people being able to achieve happiness with the person they decide to share their lives with. Likewise, as professor Drexler said, I think he did a very good job in making readers to accept the culture perceived in the planets he depicts. I think that by the end of the story readers no longer see this as weird, but rather can connect and understand the feelings Rat and Marq feel for each other.

This week, there was an interesting contrast in course material to Ishiguro’s Buried Giant. We watched an episode of Black Mirror that followed a couple and how they were affected by having a device that granted them perfect memory. Having a total-recall type memory is something that we dream about, however this episode highlighted the dark side of having infallible memory. Although the protagonist of the episode ended up finding out the truth about his wife’s affair, he ultimately had changed into an entirely different, violent person and ended up severely unhappy, thus leading him to gouge out his perfect memory device. Black Mirror is a show that often highlights what can go wrong with the exponential pace technology races at and its effects on human nature, and this episode definitely displayed all of that and more. Compared to Ishiguro’s Buried Giant where the characters have a very poor memory, both the episode and the story make me content to have a perfectly imperfect memory; not too perfect, not to forgettable. After reading through most of Buried Giant and watching the episode of Black Mirror, our imperfect memory is really what attributes a lot to human nature. Perhaps the main character of the Black Mirror episode could have lived a happier life had he not dug relentlessly into his memory archive, although he would have lived under the phrase “ignorance is bliss”.

In class this week, I thought it was interesting when we went over what makes an elevator pitch successful. In your analysis of my groups presentation, I found it very interesting that the quality of the pitch is less dependent on the content and more so on how it grabs the attention of the listener. As we were working to make the changes, it forced us to discover what was important in our actual poster. We deleted information that we thought wasn’t relevant to the audience and added, in its place, photos that serve as a visual representation.

In our new pitch, we intend to push the audiences attention towards the more prevalent photos in our poster. Instead of explaining boring factual information, we want to put the audience in real life situations so they can see the ethical consequences themselves. In this we hope, that although short, our pitch can better translate the meaning behind our research and the topics of this class.

After viewing the episode “The Entire History of You” of Black Mirror, I reflected on how memory keeps us focused on the past and not the present. In the episode, when Liam and Ffion are having sex, both individuals are viewing past sexual encounters through the grain implemented behind their ear. Once both of them climax in the real world, they stop viewing their respective recordings and begin living in the present once again. While the grain is an effect tool recall information and store happy moments, this device basically turns Liam insane with jealous and suspicion regarding Ffion and Jonas. This addition memory gained by the grain keeps Liam recounting past events and analyzing each individuals actions, drawing conclusions merely on facial reactions or simple gestures. In addition, memory can be skewed by the grain. Liam says to Ffion, “you’re a bitch, sometimes,” yet Ffion leaves out the sometimes and replays the memory. The grain ends up having destructive implications in Liam’s life: he lost his wife and child, realized his wife had cheated on him, and ended up manually removing his grain through an extremely painful method. The show seems to be a warning for what the future capacity for memory and storage can lead to. Do we want to know everything that we do and say, or is it sometimes better that we forget some details of a conversation or event? In the case of this episode, memory seemed to be the reason for the disaster that unfolded in Liam’s lap.

In addition, as Science Fiction serves as a predictor of future events, I reflected on what future technology will bring. Delany’s Web in Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand resembles our modern-day internet, and some of the innovations predicted in Black Mirror have already been implemented in our society. In an episode titled “Hated in the Nation,” the modern world no longer has bees to pollinate the plants, so mechanical bees were engineered to replace the lost species. However, a hacker could manipulate these remote-control bees and use them for deadly purposes. In our current society, bees are dying at an alarming rate, and we will need to find some supplement in the future to replace these dying species. Thus, mechanical bees are not far from being a common occurrence in our everyday lives, and we must think of the ramifications and possible implications of this new technology. In addition, in the episode “White Christmas,” a man using a software called “Eye-Link” can have dating professionals help him pick up women by seeing through his eyes and guiding his moves. With the invention of new, updated cameras and first person point of view perspective cameras, the possibility for technology such as “Eye-Link” could soon be a possibility and seriously infringe on our individual privacy. These episodes of Black Mirror serve as a warning for the harmful and disastrous consequences that new technology can have on society, and we must proceed with caution in the development of innovations that could possible conflict with society’s privacy and best interests.