This was the most difficult assignment for me, so far.

I really appreciated Linda Salzman Sagan’s reflection on the process of collecting the sounds for The Sounds of Earth: “there was a sense of wonder to it and a sense of the ridiculous and the sublime” (Taylor, 2019). At the end of the day music is not something I have any training in, so I can’t come from the perspective of evaluating the kinds of music or what entries in musical history are particularly worthwhile to preserve. I thought about types of sound, countries of origin, population centers as all possible ways to sort and prioritize these tracks.

However, this is such a small selection that it demands the perspective of thinking about “what can we afford to lose” as mentioned by Dr. Smith Rumsey (2018). Practically speaking, if we are curating all the noise that people make to ten entries, we are losing everything. So having said all of this, and leaning into the sense of the ridiculous, these are just the ten tracks that I enjoyed the most while listening to this record.

Track list – titles taken from the NASA Golden Record track listing

• “Dark Was the Night,” written and performed by Blind Willie Johnson. 3:15
• Senegal, percussion, recorded by Charles Duvelle. 2:08
• Australia, Aborigine songs, “Morning Star” and “Devil Bird,” recorded by Sandra LeBrun Holmes. 1:26
• Japan, shakuhachi, “Tsuru No Sugomori” (“Crane’s Nest,”) performed by Goro Yamaguchi. 4:51
• Navajo Indians, Night Chant, recorded by Willard Rhodes. 0:57
• Beethoven, String Quartet No. 13 in B flat, Opus 130, Cavatina, performed by Budapest String Quartet. 6:37
• Solomon Islands, panpipes, collected by the Solomon Islands Broadcasting Service. 1:12
• Azerbaijan S.S.R., bagpipes, recorded by Radio Moscow. 2:30
• Georgian S.S.R., chorus, “Tchakrulo,” collected by Radio Moscow. 2:18
• China, ch’in, “Flowing Streams,” performed by Kuan P’ing-hu. 7:37

References

• Brown University. (2018). Abby Smith Rumsey: “Digital Memory: What Can We Afford to Lose?” [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBrahqg9ZMc
• Taylor, Dallas. (Host). (April 2019). Voyager Golden Record (No. 64) [Audio podcast episode].  In Twenty Thousand Hertz. Defacto Sound.  https://www.20k.org/episodes/voyagergoldenrecord

This week I thought about what modalities included audio, could engage with the photos from the “What’s in your bag?” task, and would also move beyond just spoken word audio to include other modalities.

Ultimately I decided on creating a short podcast episode. This podcast is hosted by an AGI system and takes place in the “near distant” future. This AGI system is a bit of a humanity aficionado, and the show focuses on different ways humanity would exist in the world. In this episode the AGI is able to secure a permit to thaw an entry from the library of humanity to talk about how humanity would physically exist in the world and move from place to place.

I was thinking about the great multimodal diagram from Cazden et al. (1996) so wanted to create a visual, audio, and linguistic artifact. To that end I used a variety of tools and services and within the fiction of the episode I wanted to unadulterate the products of the systems as much as possible.

• Copilot to create the podcast logo/image
  • I did try a couple of times to get it away from such stereotypical AGI imagery and incorporate more elements of podcast splash screens/logos. Eventually I thought, maybe my ideas around what makes a good podcast image are limited by my frail humanity so I left it as-is.
• Suno.ai to create the podcast intro/outro music
  • I’m not really a music person, so this I left as-is without any micro-managing. The prompt was just around creating podcast theme music for a podcast hosted by an AGI in the near distant future.
• ChatGPT 3.5 to create the script for the AGI host
  • Again, I kept this simple and used the first output. It’s more long-winded than the script I had drafted but I realized I wanted to adhere to the in-fiction rules as much as possible.
• FreeTTS.com to generate the audio of the host from my script
  • This is far from the best AI generated voice I’ve heard but is listenable!
• Kaltura’s machine-generated captions to create captions of the final product

Finally, I wrote myself a script for my section, recorded myself, and edited it all together. I’m hopeful that this final product ticked the same boxes the images did, in a playful way.

References

• Cazden, C., Cope, B., Fairclough, N., Gee, J., & New London Group. (1996). A pedagogy of multiliteracies: Designing social futures. Harvard Educational Review, 66(1), 60-92. https://doi.org/10.17763/haer.66.1.17370n67v22j160u

WordPress seems determined to embed my emojis as images which breaks my careful formatting around line-breaks so behold: a screenshot.

Reflection

Working on this emoji story I selected my story largely based on what media I had consumed recently, eliminating a more recently consumed option that wouldn’t have been fun or entertaining for anyone, myself included due to how I didn’t even know where to start. A big thank you to my friend for making us all watch Zardoz (1974) last night, where would I even begin. So, minor spoilers, this isn’t Zardoz (1974).

As I was developing my emoji story I spent some time thinking back to my undergrad in fine art. The selection and placement of emojis reminds of a formal analysis of ancient Egyptian art when compared to more naturalist approaches of Greek and Roman. In ancient Egyptian art this person is larger because they are more important, they are portrayed ahead of the others because they are leaders, there is often text presented with images… not to even mention hieroglyphics and how we may view that as a blurring of text and image.

Admittedly, I use a lot of emojis in my day-to-day. I routinely find myself baffled by the emoji selection in MS Teams and it was a very good day for me when they allowed reacting with any emoji rather than the pre-set corporate starter pack of thumbsup, heart, etc. I found this entertaining!

Thinking about Kress (2005) specifically while composing this I found myself wondering about the immediacy of image compared to the unfolding of text. The emoji story finds a pretty comfortable middle ground. Kress (2005) also mentions considering both the fit of modality and content, but also the fit of modality and audience. I wonder about how my colleagues will find this task, how this course has provided a huge range of activities for assignments (tempered with writing for each one).

I also found myself reflecting on how this text is almost 20 years old – how have our ideas around multimodality changed in that intervening time? I wonder if we are now experiencing a similar semiotic revolution around video with the meteoric rise of short form video content in the last five years. It’s an interesting tension – video takes the audience back to the unfolding of written text, compared to the immediacy of the image.

References

• Kress, G. (2005). Gains and losses: New forms of texts, knowledge, and learning. Computers and Composition, 22(1), 5-22. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compcom.2004.12.004

Files

blogs.ubc.ca appears to have html and zip file upload turned off so I’ve uploaded to Google Drive and shared below. My reflection will contain spoilers for my incredibly fascinating work so you might want to view the Twine first 🙂

HTML instructions to view the Twine:

• download the file
• navigate to it in your file explorer
• open it in a browser

HTML file: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Ei8NpRQCou0r7hgPwAGPYJx-b6mQv-mN/view?usp=drive_link

ZIP instructions to view the Twine:

• download the file
• navigate to it in your file explorer
• open/unpack the zip
• open the .html file in a browser

ZIP file: https://drive.google.com/file/d/11XtY5mDXwlu_33QjB0cAANsdCWqMvtSw/view?usp=drive_link

Reflection

I truly have an enthusiasm for Twine as it turns out. Initially I was struggling to find an approach that resonated with me and bridged the gap between this week’s readings and my expectations of Twine. Ultimately I went with what I know best and started with a dark, stormy night and a mysterious lighthouse.

I bounced around a few ideas for mapping this activity out before starting – in the end I was torn between Coggle and handwriting a map and the fact that I’ve been struggling with headaches this week settled the deal – anything for a little less screen time.

Going into the readings this week I was mostly considering ideas of information hierarchy in the context of my experiences as a web developer. Broken links were (and are!) a nightmare of lost SEO and frustrated users. Thinking about Engelbart’s conceptual framework (1963) helped me to broaden the horizons of my thinking beyond digital information structures to include the physical structures and training that people rely on when creating work. As I read Bush (1945) I was shocked at the prescience of his writing. Lots to consider around different types of input, data, and flexibility of information – and it’s in step with conversations I’m having today around multi-modal language models like OpenAI’s 4o.

I hope I was able to effectively bring the readings and ideas together with what I think is a story in step with the fine traditions of choose-your-own-adventure.

References

• Bolter, J.D. (2001a). The electronic book. In Writing space: Computers, hypertext, and the remediation of print (pp.69-85). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
• Bolter, J.D. (2001b). Hypertext and the remediation of print. In Writing space: Computers, hypertext, and the remediation of print (pp.29-45). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
• Bush, V. (1945). As we may think. The Atlantic Monthly, 176(1). 101-108.
• Engelbart, D. (1963). A conceptual framework for the augmentation of the man’s intellect. In P. W. Hawerton & D. C. Weeks (Eds.), Vistas in information handling, Volume I: The augmentation of man’s intellect by machine. Spartan Books.
• Nelson, T. (1999). Xanalogical structure, needed now more than ever: Parallel documents, deep links to content, deep versioning and deep re-use. ACM Computing Surveys, 31(4).

Images of Hand Writing

Reflection

I elected to write by hand for this text, because I knew I’d be typing this reflection and wanted to print, write, and type in my response to this task. I found this surprisingly difficult! 500 words is a really achievable amount for me to type so I went in very overconfident but found hand-writing and maintaining a train of thought challenging across that length.

While writing I mused about the procedural differences between typing and writing. Typing lends itself to the scattered, iterative, looping writing process that I’ve developed. When I hand write it’s typically either in personal letters or my weekly planner so my editing process is more focused on adding stickers and washi tape and less focused on grammatical changes or editing for brevity and tone. I believe the choice to write really impacted how I approached the task – I felt much more pressure to have a clear idea of the final product as I worked.

An interesting side effect of writing letters that contributed to my writing process is that now I tend to outline a letter in a journal before writing it. This came about because I would send a letter and have no idea what I wrote in it – with no access to a sent folder I couldn’t remember what I had shared already! I think that dovetails with the ideas explored in both “Stuff to blow your mind” episodes around the impact of writing on the sharing or duplication of information and record keeping (Lamb & McCormick, 2020 May 26).

While my preference is informed by situation and contextually I do enjoy hand writing, it would be dishonest to ignore the idea that >90% of my writing takes the form of typing. My process, and my output, have been deeply impacted by the flexibility that typing and word processing software brings to writing tasks.

Thinking about formats for consuming information like they discuss in the second part of the invention of the book series – I don’t know that I could read a full book made from potato stamped letters, haha, but I do experience text in a variety of ways! For fun reading I typically reach for either a paper book or my Kobo, but for work I lean towards the laptop. The hosts of “Stuff to blow your mind” talk about reading books on their phones which I find mind blowing. I appreciate the opportunity take the time to consider more deeply how the format of text effects not just creation but consumption of text.

Potato Print

Reflection

I enjoyed the potato stamp process! I don’t have children but I do have a weekly Art Night where my friends gather to work on creative projects of all kinds and this was right over the plate for us. You can see the second image in the gallery shows the work my friends created. Because I integrated this into Art Night the process took about an hour for me with lots of chatting and iterative testing of the stamps as we worked. It was interesting to note that one friend arrived organically to the idea of multi color printing “if only I could do a mid tone” – you can through a second stamp! He was not invested enough to pursue a second stamp after his first one, but that was an interesting process to arrive at.

I selected the word “muzak” to print. I had attended a panel that day around generative AI use principles and guidelines at UBC and I found it interesting they lingered over the idea of “original thought”. I wrote on that in my handwriting a little bit, but I find the discussion around original thought quite interesting. In print-making particular – what is original when dealing with a series of reproductions? In thought – what is remix, what is constitutes originality? It smacks of goalpost moving, for me, the idea that there’s an inherent nugget of originality that only human intelligence can achieve… So why “muzak” instead of “music”? I was framing the elevator, easy listening, light, consumable approach of “muzak” compared to “music” as a parallel of generated text versus human written text. I think the space originality is interesting to explore as we are asking more foundational questions about the use of AI.

One aspect of the letters selected in my word “muzak” is that I do write z differently but couldn’t make the stamp work – something about the curve in my hand-writing of z was hard to capture and it wound up looking like a backwards 3 each time! Ultimately I chose to abandon my hand-writing approach and move to a different rendering of z for readability.

Generated Transcription of Hand Written Text

For fun, I thought I’d upload the images of my handwriting to try and automatically generate a transcript or image description of my written work. This was generated with Claude on June 6, 2024 and I have not edited it for accuracy as I’m interested in how the generated writing differs from the hand written text. Honestly, there are not that many mistakes considering the contrast of the pen I selected and my chicken-scratch!

4.4 Task 4: Manual Scripts

Overall, this task contrasts manual and mechanized forms of writing. I wonder about more fringe spaces like the use of AI-supported tools for writing such as Grammarly. Typing versus writing are different ways to approach text development and it impacts the final product in ways from start to finish. What about the layers of additional tweaks? I always get off-ice- suggestions to support brevity and conciseness in my writing, but when hand-writing I’m not getting those direct suggestions. As an exercise, I think I’ll go back and edit this – but when I’m writing letters or in my weekly planner, I don’t actively participate in that editing process in the same way as when I write for work or school using a computer… Circling back to AI – only after the AI course last term have I done really any editing using ChatGPT – overall I still haven’t incorporated it into my own workflows but I know many others have. From my perspective, it’s interesting to consider text as both output and input in these platforms, which is a real departure to how I naturally or currently consider handwritten text. I also typically approach writing in process differently in computer- or mechanized writing –

Image 2: For example I typically start with a structure and I write within that structure. As part of editing, I will move paragraphs around, to experiment with the flow. To contrast, when I am hand writing I feel more pressure to not require that level of foundational editing, as it would be more labour intensive.
This idea of labour is an interesting one to explore especially in this AI-impacted context. I’m in currently AI-operated writing can extend my mechanized writing approach with prompting. I could generate an outline and structure, then generate text, revise, restructure and re order it. How different is that from my mechanized writing which so easily enables me to make those edits and revisions? I’ve asked a few LLMs about human versus AI generated content and originality, and have found pretty unremarkable answers. Claude, which launched today in Canada, indicates that only human original creativity is created on a foundation of understanding of concept when compared to generating text based on probabilities, predictions.

Image 3: I find that unsatisfying / I’m sure I will continue to find many philosophical questions unsatisfying, as we continue down this AI-enabled road. What can I do to understand the gaps between A.I generated content and human generated content on a philosophical or epistemological level? Does the fact that I’ve slowly and painfully writtn this out versus typing it quickly and easily impacted this text? I bet it’s less cohesive than if I didn’t have to stop repeatedly when my arm starts cramping, such as my clutch on this pen. I bet if I typed this I could have been finished an age ago. What kind of point was I trying to make?

References

Lamb, R., & McCormick, J. (Hosts). (2020, May 26). From the vault: Invention of the book, part 1. [Audio podcast episode]. In Stuff to blow your mind. iHeart Radio.

Lamb, R., & McCormick, J. (Hosts). (2020, May 28). From the vault: Invention of the book, part 2. [Audio podcast episode]. In Stuff to blow your mind. iHeart Radio. 

Voice to Text using Windows

OK so I feel like the first thing that I have to say is that this is really uncomfortable for me that was something I really had to get over at the beginning of the pandemic was how uncomfortable and awkward and embarrassed I feel when I talk to a computer so that was like something that I I had to deal with I especially with zoom and when there’s technical issues still it it just like I don’t know I I feel terrible about it so I I feel embarrassed during this that’s my first thing the second thing I guess that I’m going to talk about is movie that I just watched so I finally watched dream scenario I am a pretty big Nicolas Cage fan so so I’m you know try to watch everything that he puts out and I think lately there’s been a cage renaissance of sorts but dream scenario was amiss for me which is interesting I think because on paper there’s a lot there that I should like I I would argue it was miscategorized by almost everything like the YouTube algorithm says that it’s a comedy we rented it off of YouTube I find that very interesting because it’s certainly not funny but at the same time I think it’s funny and maybe the same way that the office is funny which I can’t watch also because I find it so uncomfortable so maybe what I’m arguing is that the office is not a comedy either and so maybe I think it’s not a horror movie either although it seems like the marketing kind of leaned into the horror aspect and there is like a nod to that idea that it’s a horror movie but it but it doesn’t it does remain in that space enough I think to be fully called over film I I think I have to argue that it it’s creating a new genre of of of a new sub genre of horror maybe instead of something like body horror you know a horror that really focuses on embodiment of of like fear and and modifications and changes to your physical body I argue that dream scenario is maybe the first entry social horror genre and not one where you are looking at society as a horrifying thing but the social death of a of a person I guess is maybe what we’re talking about like watching someone who’s totally graceless just fail over and over and over again is social horror I think that’s I think that’s horrifying I would hate to for that to happen to me add but why I thought it was a miss I mean I think that it didn’t go very far in any direction and I think that is a complaint that I wind up happening with a lot of Nicolas Cage movies I wonder if it’s because I think that everything that he’s in should be so bombastic that when something is simply just I don’t know typical maybe I think that’s disappointing when it could be going to absolute extremes like to contrast this let’s look at at another couple of semi recent I say semi recent because time lately has been really compressed but semi recent cage films like you did the color out of space and that was I thought amazing I mean that was it really went in every direction that it needed to go I thought he did Mandy which has become one of my favorite films I think Mandy also goes it pursues the direction that it that it sets out in and and it perceives it to an extreme which I find to be much more interesting than something like dream scenario which I think has some interesting ideas the social death and explored in a supernatural way which as opposed to like a more typical drama exploring social death is interesting to me but I I didn’t think that it went far enough I think what could have been really interesting is if the film had played more with the dream aspect and moved directly into is it real or is it dream more and more of the film taking place within dream I think that could have been an interesting place to just explore but you know what it’s been 3 days and I’m still thinking about it so maybe I’m not giving it enough credit for what it accomplished anyway these are my 5 minutes of talking about Nicolas Cage films and talking to my computer and feeling very embarrassed about it the whole time thank you for reading or listening thank you computer for listening thank you reader for reading

Reflection

It appears that Windows voice to text when used out of the box with no settings tweaks eschews punctuation entirely, so that’s an impactful difference. This lack of punctuation really emphasizes my rambling. I do a lot of asides when speaking, more than I do when I’m writing, and especially more than I do when I’m doing more typical academic writing. Even in the process of writing this reflection I’m a very iterative writer, I re-read a lot, make tweaks, swap words. In oral communication that’s not an option. I’m itching to edit that text but am going to resist.

By and large the voice to text functionality captured the words I was saying. Without any punctuation it becomes difficult to parse, especially since speaking flows organically. It also doesn’t capture proper nouns to capitalize, which makes sense as a limitation of speech to text. I tested this in ChatGPT’s speech-to-text feature on their iOS app and it captured proper nouns to capitalize them. I think that is neat to reflect on even if it just the technology limitations of the default Windows speech-to-text versus a flagship consumer AI product.

I consider the lack of proper nouns a mistake as it makes reading the text more difficult. I’ve been writing a lot of alt text and image descriptions and using NVDA to navigate courses lately at work, and this has been something I’ve mulled over – proper nouns are contextually only important in written communication, but when they are missing I do find it disruptive. But I am able to follow when people tell me stories verbally without capitalization… interesting.

My vocal ticks like ums and hmms all seem to have been captured in different ways – as letters or other words but not typically captured as ums or ahs. I consider that a mistake as it’s changing the contents of the text. I wonder if it’s doing that not because it’s difficult to identify an um as an um, but trying to distance from the idea that the content is voice to text, as written text wouldn’t include ums and ahs. Trying to obfuscate that it’s a transcript of spoken word perhaps?

Had I scripted and rehearsed this I think there would be less asides, less wandering, and a much more concrete structure. Less errors from the vocal tisks being transcribed. Overall a much easier reading experience – but I would imagine less interesting to listen to! A space that would be interesting to explore is the contextual importance of some grammar rules like proper noun capitalization. It bothers me when reading a text that doesn’t have it, but it simply doesn’t exist for oral storytelling. On the flip side – what exists in oral story telling that doesn’t in written? I keep setting up and knocking down examples for myself – emphasis can be communicated through bold, italicizing, or size. Pacing: through…. punctuation. Characterization or accent can be dissected and written but I’ll admit I often have to read out loud to understand what is being said when accents are written in books (the Nac Mac Feegle spring to mind, to bring another mention of Sir Terry Pratchett to my writing in this course). I think that oral storytelling’s slippery, ephemeral nature is the starkest contrast to written storytelling. Written text is captured, oral storytelling resists that capture.

“We can plant ideas in each other’s minds using a finite set of words that we recombine into an infinite set of meanings” [00:43]

I’m thinking about this in the context of generative AI – a lot of the conversations around AI I’ve been involved in are situated around the idea of original production and what constitutes that. For example, can generative AI create new things or is it just remixing things – if all my experience with language is remix, what is remix, is remix creation? From an art copyright standpoint remix is creation after a point, this sentence centers the idea all language expression is remix.

“Whenever you utter a sentence, you are only uttering a tiny proportion of the information you know about the scenario” [07:15]

Thinking about text and technology, text as a construction, what you choose and select in terms of building materials and structure can result in many different spaces. Different places in the world with different contexts build homes in many ways – mitigating heat or trapping warmth, indoor outdoor living, or stark divides between interior and exterior. It makes sense that different places in the world would develop different structural needs for language in the same way.

“In the 1970s and 1980s in cognitive science it became essentially taboo, to think about how language might shape the way you think” [09:50]

This is fascinating to me because it’s one of those things that seems so obvious…  For example, when testing for reading comprehension you construct tests to explore a certain competency, but you can’t test what isn’t articulated and different languages would articulate different things – wouldn’t the difference result in differing priorities or pathways for learning?

Later Dr Borditsky speaks about “what we attend to” which I think is an interesting idea – sort of like the affordances of technology we need to consider what we are afforded by our use of language.

“The other thing that language does for us is helps us construe and construct events” [26:05]

Again, with these concepts of construction, assembly. This comes up for me a lot in work. I work a lot via text, emails, texts, MS Teams. It’s interesting to note in these written formats that I see a lot of this passive voice rearing its head in times when mistakes have been made. I do find myself deliberately constructing space between my team and events when I need to articulate there’s no causal link between a mistake and our team, for example. I’m also a guilty reader of online advice columns and when the passive voice creeps in you know the author has been up to some truly heinous misdeeds.

“But on the other hand, cultures also reduce cognitive entropy” [44:30]

This is connected to a Derek Bruff newsletter I read last week around creativity, divergent thinking, and AI. Bruff mentions that problem solving is generally a combination of divergent thinking (brainstorming) and convergent thinking (what of these options is the best) (Bruff, 2024). He indicates AI can be a wonderful tool for brainstorming but can also make it difficult to come up with out of the box ideas – like Borditsky mentioned once you have the tool or idea it’s difficult to come up one more level back to that divergent thinking, to reinvent the wheel so to speak.

“Depending on the level that you define universality, there are of course things that you find across all languages” [51:50]

Borditsky goes on to list some areas of universality but starts with the idea of human languages being learnable by humans – I find that a fascinating way of starting that response. This again takes me back to natural language processing and the increasingly blurry line between human and machine language. We’re in the midst of a really significant change to those boundaries and while I’ve been considering the impacts these changes will have on machine language, I think I’ve not been considering what might be coming back the other way in terms of impacts on human language. In the defining terms activity we thought about this – ways that words have been evolving in light of the internet.

References

Bruff, D. (May 16 2024). Creativity, divergent thinking, and AI. Intentional Teaching Newsletter.

SAR School for Advanced Research. (June 7 2017). Lera Boroditsky, how the languages we speak shape the way we think [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iGuuHwbuQOg

I love this idea! I actually spend a lot of time thinking about this – as someone who has a long commute a few days a week. I have three ‘loadouts’ for myself.

Long commute day

On a long commute day I carry a backpack and small bag. The contents of the backpack include my work laptop (not pictured) and these items:

• Two batteries
• Two lipsticks (one pink, one neutral)
• Mask
• Pouch usually filled with cables, and tampons
• Wallet
• Two hair ties
• Loose toonie – BC Transit bus fare backup
• Two mini USB to USB A cable
• One iPad USB C cable
• One Lightning iPhone cable
• A/C adapter for all the cables
• Ethernet to USB C cable
• Typically this bag also will hold my lunch

Why two batteries you ask? Great question, and when I remember why I put them in my bag I will be free to take them out, but no sooner.

Running Errands

For errands we get to just use the small bag, the contents of which are:

• Sunglasses (prescription)
• Card holder lanyard
  • Compass Card
  • UBC Card
  • BC Ferries Experience Card
• Tampons
• Hair tie
• Two hair clips
• Mini chapstick
• Keys

This bag is my every day carry. Sidebar – does anyone else get offered Chapstick at the dentist? The dentist I go to has the best Chapstick and I try to make that mini one last until my next appointment.

Ramble

If I’m not either going to work or for errands I might just be going for a ramble, in which case I only bring my phone and headphones. My home screen looks like this:

• Pokemon Go Widget
• Four custom shortcuts – Spotify, “Google It”, Podcasts, and Whatsapp
• Libby Widget – showing that I’m 10% done listening to Maskerade by Terry Pratchett (again)
• Weather Widget
• Four more custom shortcuts – messages, phone, email, calendar

I use custom shortcuts to avoid the red notification dot whenever possible. Let me live in blissful ignorance!

Statement

I’m Brie. I work at the Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences in the Office of Educational Technology and Learning Designs at UBC. I’ve selected my three most common loadouts for this task as I think it gives a bit of encapsulation of fractal humanity. My long commute includes a ferry (I’m currently writing this at the ferry terminal, another cancelled ferry). I feel grateful and also frustrated to have commute days like this – the weather is beautiful, I love my job, I’m so lucky to live where I do, I find the waiting so frustrating, the bus was stuck in traffic, I missed the last ferry by minutes.

I think my bags have some evidence of this commute and the impact it has on my life – I need to carry chargers to keep my technology up over the course of a day, my Compass card and BC Ferries Experience card are my near-constant companions, and without Libby, Podcasts, and Spotify I’d be in a very different mindset. At the same time I also think what isn’t in my bag shows some of this impact as well: I don’t carry paper books with me because of the weight and I select my lunches based on what fits in my bag.

I carry a variety of charging cords with me, and the ethernet adaptor has saved me more times than I like to admit. My home screen has been curated to remove any notifications, but my many chargers speak to a sense of anxiety about being left disconnected. I carry a full wallet on long days but rely on my Apple Wallet almost completely for payment for most of my life. I’d like to think the focus on technology and preparedness creates a somewhat cohesive narrative with my outward image, though my constantly fly-away hair, small collection of hair management accessories, and variety of collected tampons across multiple bags speak to a somewhat different, less well-collected image.

Technology is both very present in my bag and somewhat absent, in my view. My home screen lacks shortcuts to ChatGPT, Gemini, or Poe, my bag didn’t contain my Kobo when I photographed it, my work laptop is not state of the art, but the impact of technology is felt through peripheral evidence. This may reflect an unease truce that I’ve arrived at internally between my work in technology and my growing unease around the treadmill of consumption that technology tries to get me running on.

15 or 25 years ago I’m not sure how many people would live where I live with the distance to work. I believe it’s not completely uncommon now with hybrid work, but I know my own relationship with work distance was very different even 5 years ago, and that was reflected by a much smaller bag and much less preparation for travel and fallback plans. I think that archeologists in the future may have a lot to think about with the last five years and next five years – first the COVID-19 pandemic changing many of our relationships to work, next the proliferation of AI tools further impacting how many of us manifest our livings in the world.