Holeton, Research Links for Chapter 1

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1. Study several articles relating to computer technology or electronic communication from the business section of your newspaper, popular news magazines, or Internet sources. Analyze the language used to refer to human beings or human activities, and consider (a) the extent to which people and activities are portrayed in terms of Sherry Turkle’s windows metaphor, or (b) the extent to which information is portrayed in terms of Michael Reddy’s conduit metaphor (as discussed by George Lakoff. What other metaphors do these texts rely on? How powerful do you think such metaphors and language are in shaping people’s attitudes about technology? How important are they in constructing your own self-image?

2. If you have access to the Internet, find and experiment with a real MUD or MOO. You might start your search at Lydia Leong’s "The MUD Resource Collection"; student-friendly MOOs include DaMOO and Diversity University, where teachers can bring their whole class. Alternatively, join an Internet Relay Chat (IRC) channel for several sessions. (For help in connecting to a MUD, MOO, or IRC, ask your teacher or the computer support staff at your school or place of work, or refer to an Internet reference guide.) After you’ve tried one or more of these real-time communication or "text-based virtual reality spaces," do some more reading about them, both in print and online. A good start would be Sherry Turkle’s book from which the selection in this chapter was excerpted. Based on your initial experiences, how do you evaluate some of the claims -- by Turkle and others -- about the nature of identity in cyberspace or the relationship between real life and virtual reality? Write a research paper in which you take a position about a controversial or constructive aspect of MOOs, MUDs, or IRC, such as their potential for abuse or their potential as an expressive or educational medium.

3. Charles Platt writes in this chapter about his participation in the fourth annual Loebner Contest in 1994. Information about subsequent contests is available on the Loebner contest home page. Use library and Internet sources to find out about historical or more recent attempts to pass the Turing test. On the Web, search for the Turing Test, artifical intelligence (AI), or artifical life (AL); using most search engines you will find thousands of references to these topics. Browse these sources or narrow your search to help you find a specific topic within AI or AL research that interests you, such as neural networks or software agents, as a focus your own research writing.

4. "We are mind and machine mediated through mind and machine," writes Ellen Ullman, and the relationship between body, mind, and technology is a major theme in this chapter. Cyborgs -- a contraction of "cybernetic organism," a combination of artificial and biological systems -- have been a frequent subject in popular culture at least since Norbert Wiener’s 1948 book Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (MIT Press), which first suggested that biological systems may be seen in terms of how they organize information. Science fiction movies and TV series of the 1950s and 1960s often portrayed robots and cyborgs. In the 1970s and 1980s "unmanned" spaceships and spy satellites proliferated, and since then, a revolution in computer technology has further complicated the line between human and mechanical systems. In 1985 critic Donna Haraway published "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century," which has been widely discussed in academia (the essay was revised for Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, Routledge, 1991);The Cyborg Handbook (Routledge), edited by Chris Hables Gray, was published in 1995. Some possible approaches for a research project on cyborgs include: (a) changing notions of cyborgs in popular media; (b) a critical history of cybernetics, including the views of modern-day cognitive linguists such as this chapter’s George Lakoff; (c) a focus on feminism and technology, examining Ullman’s and Haraway’s ideas along with those of other critics.

5. The film Johnny Mnemonic, written by William Gibson and directed by Robert Longo, was released on Tristar Home Video in 1995. Other recent movies exploring cyborg or human identity and technology themes include Blade Runner (Embassy Home Entertainment, 1983; Janus Films/Voyager, 1987), directed by Ridley Scott and based on Philip K. Dick’s 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?; The Lawnmower Man (New Line Cinema, 1992), directed by Brett Leonard and based on a Stephen King short story; and Crash (Alliance Communications, 1996), directed by David Cronenberg and based on the 1973 novel by J.G. Ballard. Pick two such movies, along with the original fiction on which they’re based, and compare how they portray people’s relationship with technology. If possible, include a wide range of sources in your research such as film criticism from scholarly journals; reviews from popular magazines and newspapers; commercial and research-oriented Web sites; and relevant Usenet discussion groups. If you select movies based on novels or stories, such as those listed here, you might focus on how technology themes get treated similarly and differently in the two media, film and print.