Week 3

Interactivity. To manipulate one’s experience of media independently, as and when one wants to and to establish communication through the use of it. One analogy was given in class which gave me a clearer interpretation of the idea was: imagine being able to speak freely and voice out one’s opinion through the TV with the newscaster, instead of just absorbing whatever information the TV is giving us. An example would be the worldwide web.

The Medium is the Message -Marshall McLuhan

With respect to the Worldwide web, Marshall McLuhan, the man who predicted it 30 years before its advent, is well-known for the above quote. What he meant was that medium itself should be the focus of study instead of the content it carries and that it has an effect on society not because of its content but for the nature and characteristics of it as a medium. For McLuhan, it was the medium itself that shaped and controlled “the scale and form of human association and action.” I agree with him on this point with the example of a newspaper and the worldwide web (online news). The invention of Newspapers brings families and neighbourhoods together to address important issues in the vicinity, people also get to know what’s going on in other countries but that’s about it, whereas for online news, what we see in newspapers (what newspaper can provide for us a medium) can be found in online news. On top of that, online news reaches out to a global audience, bringing viewers from different continents around the world, and with the invention of laptops, anyone from anywhere is able to comment and contribute to the news their thoughts and opinions in real-time. What we see here, as compared to newspaper, Online News greatly increases the scale of how we humans communicate and get things done.

With all respect to McLuhan, we cannot simply ignore the content and focus on the medium, yes, medium greatly exponentiates the advancement and growth of societies but the content coming along with it has to be good, beneficial and educational content, otherwise, we will be exponentiating ourselves to failure and doom.

However, I do believe if you manipulate machinery, you affect/change/influence society which was on one of the slides shown in class. This brings me to one of the question discussed in class: “Are Machinery and Society inextricably linked?” 

In my opinion, Machinery and Society are inseparable, one cannot exist without the other. Machinery shapes Society and the very existence of society and what we have today, how far we have come to are largely due to the existence of machinery. In prehistoric times, Men use stones to do cave drawings. In this case, the stone is the machine, it helps men communicate more efficiently and get more tasks done with the collective effort of a group of people, a little bit of effort from a lot of people, allowing men to make huge accomplishments. Humans accomplish great things in groups and the machine that brings them together is what forms a society. In today’s world, the medium of messages is that stone in Prehistoric times. The study of the medium of messages and the improvement of it is the foundation of society.

Thus, to advance and improve as a human race is to improve the efficiency of the way we communicate (medium of a message), instead of just what we communicate.

 

Week 4

Hypermedia. The linking of separated media elements to create a trail of personal association.An example of hypermedia would be what was mentioned earlier, the worldwide web. The first Hypermedia was the Aspen Movie Map. It allows the user to take a virtual tour around Aspen, Colorado.

Looking at this now, it reminds me a bit of Google Maps and it would seem like a pretty common and normal technology, but back in the 1970s, it must be a very huge breakthrough. I would say that hypermedia brought people into this virtual experience, bringing the medium of the message to a new level because this is a huge advancement of the medium. With this new technology, it has helped create a lot of possibilities, such as military, transport, etc, however, with such technology, it brings us to one of the questions asked in class, and that was “Would it make people give up the idea of actually going out in real life?”. Back in the 1970s, with such poor computer graphics and systems, I’m sure it would be a huge no. In today’s world, it would still be a no for me, because, I would still prefer face to face interaction and actually be out in the open.

However, in the future, when technology is so advanced till the point, where we cannot differentiate real world from the virtual world, where when we access the Aspen Movie Map, we could smell, feel, hear, see and even touch everything and when we can purchase items and settle issues virtually “face-to-face”. At this stage, would we still want to go out physically? When we can easily mistake our actions in this virtual world as not having any impact just like in present-day gaming world, and commit crimes unknowingly or causing serious harm to another by our actions in this new world just because we think it is the virtual world and it is okay. We are already seeing a rise in cybercrimes in the present-day world. Imagine in the future with technology that is 10 times more advanced than present day. Would such tech then be the advancement of humanity or the loss of it?

 

Week 5

Immersion. The experience of entering into a simulation or a 3-D environment. What caught my attention during this week’s lecture was the advent of the flight simulator in 1929, “The Pilot-Maker”. The idea of it was to train pilots and astronauts by putting them in a virtual environment before allowing them to take on the real deal. This is closely linked to “Sensorama”, an early day 3-D Virtual Reality simulator.

This makes me can’t help but to think about such technology which is mainly focused on gaming in today’s world to be shifted to the military and the possibilities it could have there. Imagine in the future, where the VR tech is so advanced, that virtual training environments are as good as reality, imagine the amount of expenses saved on training equipment. Such measures can already be seen in some armed forces in the world. For example, in the US, VR is used in various vocations to immerse soldiers in realistic warfare scenarios, so that they would be better equipped to face the actual war.

 

 

How Virtual Reality Is Changing Military Training

https://unimersiv.com/military-incorporating-vr-troop-training/

Imagine technology equivalent or even more advanced than the movie “Ready Player One” being used by the military.