A vision for a Dystopian Future:

It was another rainy afternoon on the coastal city of Vancouver, B.C. in the year 2051.  35 year old Marek was deep in thought as the automatically driven electric vehicle pulled up to the 80 floor apartment building that held his living quarters.  He really would have loved to go out with some friends tonight, but it wasn’t his allotted recreation day.

‘Arrived at destination’ a dispassionate female voice chimed in.  ‘A reminder that nutrition rations have been delivered and that your assigned regeneration time is from 9:30 PM until 6:00 AM.’

‘Thank you, Sirexa’, Marek replied back.  The politeness incentive that GAPPLE (Google merged with Apple) introduced 20 years ago seemed like a good idea at the time – an increasingly rude and selfish society that could earn points every time one demonstrated good manners and politeness to the digital assistant Sirexa, with the hopes that it would translate to human peers.  It initially was to help teach the children, but adults bought into it as well.  At first, the idea was that the points could be traded in for small rewards such as toys or gift cards at a few participating retailers, and the feature was initially embraced quite warmly by parents and the public in general.  It became a competitive game to see how many points one could collect in a day simply from vocally asking Sirexa to drive to work, order groceries, turn lights on, check the fridge contents, etc.  People would post their daily point scores on their social media in order to brag.  Back then, nobody was concerned about how much control was given to the computer, or how much data was being collected on them as the computer was listening, watching, and assessing.

The data that was collected over time became much more than just about ‘please’ and ‘Thank you’.  Sirexa was keeping tabs on what you were buying with your implanted chip (which took the place of credit cards – they said it was much safer and harder for fraudsters to hack), what food you were eating (Sirexa kept track of fridge contents), where you were going, who you were interacting with over social media… And the data was constantly collected and analyzed. Eventually, newborns were automatically implanted with the chip and data started being collected right from birth.  The computer assigned an intelligence and aptitude score based on social interactions and impromptu ‘fun quizzes’ that would pop up on the social media accounts.

Marek tapped the back of his hand to the payment terminal – the implanted chip would deduct the payment from his account.

In 2035, after dealing with severe food and resource shortages caused by overpopulation and several years of catastrophic pandemics, climate and weather disasters, the ‘Decisive Initiative on Climate Emergency Symposium’ (DICES) attended by all world leaders, decided that drastic worldwide measures needed to be made to preserve humanity.  Food would be rationed and mostly sourced locally.  Travel would be limited to local areas only.  Fossil fuels would be phased out – especially with regards to transportation.  Population would be controlled by mandatory implanted birth control, and birth rate would be strictly controlled.  People would have to apply to have children, and would be granted their wish if it fit with sustainable computer-generated population projections.  People would be assigned a job where they were needed regardless of prior careers or training.  The computer would project areas of need and match up with people with appropriate aptitude scores.  Children in school would be placed in individualized programs based on their computer-generated aptitude and intelligence test scores that would prepare them for a vocation that was projected to be in demand.

These were drastic measures, and it was acknowledged that there would be much resistance, but it was ‘For the good of humanity’.  Enforcement would be through the implanted chips – most people in the developed world had them already so it was an easy transition.  The richer countries agreed to share resources with the poorer ones as long as their population was connected with chips.  Everything would be recorded and controlled through these chips – work attendance, food/resource consumption, health statistics/medical visits, and social interactions.  Compliance would be enforced with ‘fines’.  Those fun points that were collected for being polite now became points for food, recreation time, travel allowance, etc. and points could be taken away as easily as they were given.

Marek entered the building – no key was required as the implanted chip was automatically scanned and the door opened for him.  He entered the elevator and another dispassionate voice spoke up.

‘Which floor please?’

’Home please.’ Marek responded.  The computer knew which floor to stop at.  His apartment was very small, 200 square feet, but it was all that he was allotted.  The 55^th floor apartment had a decent view, but not much else.  When he got to his door, he picked up and brought in the weekly food rations left there.

The evening was spent preparing and eating his limited dinner, speaking to family with a virtual reality device, and doing more virtual reality preparation/training for his job.  Regeneration time (sleep) was uneasy as Marek longed for the freedoms he dimly remembered as a child.

A vision for a Utopian future:

It was a typical rainy day in Vancouver B.C. in 2051 as an autonomous car pulled up to the front of an 80 story apartment building.

‘Destination Reached’ the car cheerfully chimed.

‘Thank you Sirexa’ the passenger said as he stepped out into the drizzle.  He tapped his credit card onto the payment console.

The rain was a good sign that the weather was finally in control.  30 years ago, there had been a large series of global disasters caused by climate change that had produced severe food and resource shortages, particularly for the poorer countries.  World leaders of all the nations met together with scientists from all around the world for a month-long summit to deal with the climate crisis.  At this meeting of ‘Action on Climate Emergency Strategies’ (ACES), there was much talk about what needed to be done in order to meet the needs of an exponentially growing population, and an increasingly unstable and unpredictable planet.  It was decided that more resources needed to be provided to long term solutions such as voluntary population control, eliminating plastic waste, building carbon capture plants, and sending mining robots on the moon and nearby asteroids to obtain needed minerals that were becoming too difficult, rare, or environmentally damaging to acquire on earth.

The passenger, Marek, was one of the new line of ‘virtual miners’.  His job was to sit in a room with 200 other miners with a virtual headset and hand sets.  He was connected to one of many mining robots that was sitting on Asteroid 2021 RS2.  When he was connected to his equipment, he could see the asteroid and move the robot as if he was actually there.  Daily during his 8 hour shift, he would activate the robot to drill, clean, sort and package the minerals mined on the asteroid.  Once loaded onto a space shuttle, the ores would make the trip to earth where they would be used for building, medications, garden soil enhancement, or electronics.  At the end of their life, the electronics were recycled and the minerals and materials reused as much as possible.  The virtual mining allowed for safe, efficient and clean operations that provided the materials without the same degree of personal risk and environmental damage to the earth.

Marek opened the door to his apartment.  His wife, Sheila came to greet him.

‘How was your day?’ Sheila asked

‘Not too bad, I managed to drill out 2 tons of potassium ore today.  How was yours?’

‘Pretty non-eventful.  My grade 9 science class is coming along quite nicely.  They are working in their groups and coming up with some cool ideas for new possible species we could find on the new planet.  When I hear them dictate their notes, they seem to have a great grasp on things’

School was held remotely because of the very long battle with the Covid 19 pandemic that eventually transitioned all teaching permanently to virtual.  Each student had a virtual headset that placed them in a virtual ‘room’ with the other students and teachers so that they could interact as if they were actually physically together.

‘How are they submitting their assignments?’ asked Marek

‘Oh, they’re all on an interactive 3-D video that will allow the viewer to interact with the characters presenting the project.’

‘That’s very cool’ Marek said.  I wish they were that advanced when I went to school.’

‘Your daughter could use some help with her math’ Sheila said – go check on her before dinner.

Marek went to see his daughter just as she was completing an exercise on her tablet.

‘I hear that you are having problems?’ Marek said

‘Not any more, I did a short quiz, the program targeted where my weakness was and gave me some extra steps to practice.  I get it now.  All I have to do now is dictate my report for English class.’

Just then, Sheila called them to dinner which was a manufactured chicken casserole (real meat was no longer available – it was all synthetically grown meat).  The rest of the evening was spent on personal interest projects and discussion.  As Marek fell asleep that night, he dreamt about mining, math, and chicken dinner.

I made it!!  I have to say that this site/game is a compilation of the most frustrating websites that I have encountered in my worst nightmares .  I have frequently encountered confusing, deceptive, and poorly designed sites that are very difficult to navigate and frustrating, and could see all the elements of them here.  Fortunately, I’m a fan of ‘escape room’ games and I’m used to clicking at random places on screens to find ways to advance.

First of all, there were the examples of intended misdirection – the large fonts/buttons that one is automatically drawn to.  The first page shows a green button with the word ‘no’ that is intended to misdirect you into clicking it to advance.  Click-bait works like this – the headline will say something like ‘Take a look at what [insert obscure celebrity] looks like now’… and when you actually follow the link, the page is filled with ads and large buttons to click but the one you actually need to click in order to advance to the next slide is written in small print somewhere on the bottom of the page.  This uses the psychological tendencies Brignull mentions on the ‘Dark Patterns’ webpage where people just scan pages and follow defaults.

There was the annoying pop-up timer that is intended to cause you to make hurried choices/decisions (confusing to figure out how to get rid of it), and the pop-up on the bottom right corner that was supposed to ‘help’ (with over 400 people waiting in front of you).  The predictive text in the ‘help’ box was amusing but annoying as well.

To advance to the second page, the ‘here’ where you had to click was not highlighted or clear, and then to advance to page 3 (after going through one of my pet peeves – ridiculous password requirements), one had to accept the ‘terms and conditions’, but in order to do that, one had to actually access the ‘terms and conditions’ page and click ‘accept’ there (after an excruciatingly long and tedious scrolling task).  This actually could be considered more of an example of an ethical/honest practice on the part of the website since one is forced to actually go through the terms and conditions more carefully rather than just click ‘accept’ and move on.  That being said, this page is so full of legalese and technical jargon that intended confusion just leads to reluctant submission to the policies set by the website.  To ‘upload’ a picture, the instructions were backward – the ‘download’ button was most prominent (going back to the ‘default’ tendencies).  This was the most difficult page for me to get past.

Part 3 was just very poorly designed data collection, only giving 2 options for title, not allowing for typing number entry for the address (only being allowed to advance one number at a time), the months being scrambled, and the age slider being quite unwieldy.

Page 4 was another example of one of my pet-peeves on websites – the picture verifications that are always difficult to decipher.

Overall, I think this game was meant to be an exemplar of the most user unfriendly and worst possible website designs and interfaces, but there were also examples of the deception and pressure tactics that subversive companies can use as described by Brignull.

Here is an example of a click-bait site that has so many examples mentioned on the ‘dark patterns’ site (apologies for the poor picture quality – not sure why it came in so blurry).  Note the red ‘next’ buttons look like they take you to the next page in the story, but they are actually ad buttons.  The button that advances the story is a less prominent blue below.

Here is another example – a pop-up ad that came up on my screen…

The ‘sign me up’ is first, prominent, highlighted, and appeals to the default mentality.  The ‘terms and conditions’ are in small print at the bottom.

Internet literacy and critical evaluation is so vital, and this week has just highlighted the importance of ‘buyer beware’ more than ever before – the importance of carefully reading everything.

References:

• Brignull, H. (2011). Dark Patterns: Deception vs. Honesty in UI Design. Interaction Design, Usability, 338.

This week’s assignment was a large challenge for me.  I watched the assigned videos about how data is networked and linked, but when presented with the visualization of our entered data from week 8, it was quite overwhelming.  I have a fairly large computer monitor, but found myself longing for a much larger screen to spread out the graph so that I could see the connections more clearly.  I played with the interface a bit, trying to follow the links and decipher the meanings behind the sizes of the nodes and how everything was connected.

My next step was to separate my name out and then gradually add more curators to build more and more connections and watch now the networks grew.  I organized the graphic to put the curators in a circle and then the most popular tracks in the center of the circle.

I found it interesting how some tracks came out as fast favourites – such as ‘Fifth Symphony’ and ‘Melancholy Blues’.   The ‘percussion’ track from Senegal,   and ‘Jaat Kahan Ho’ also seemed to be popular choices.  The original selection of the 10 tracks didn’t have much in the way of concrete parameters or criteria so I read the reasonings my classmates wrote on their week 8 blogs.  Much selection was based more upon personal preference, auditory appeal, evoked emotions, and seemingly to a lesser degree on representing different instrumentation or musical diversity – possibly representative of the often expressed limited musical theoretical knowledge in the class.  Since there was a large Eurocentric representation of material in the original list, the multicultural element was already limited as well.  The most popular piece on the list, the Fifth Symphony also seemed to be the most familiar.  The least popular songs were most likely those that didn’t appeal to the emotions or weren’t as pleasing as the more popular ones.  Considering the number of people in the class having to choose 10 out of 27 songs, the number of possible combinations (considering the absence of concrete parameters) is astronomical, especially with the huge diversity of cultures and backgrounds of the curators, but there are some elements of some songs that seemed to have a wide appeal.

As for the community, I was in a group with 3 other people, and there were only 2 songs that all 4 of us had chosen.  Out of the others, 6 songs were connected to three of us, and 3 were connected to only 2 of us.  The rest were all just orphan lines that had no other connections in this group.

Comparing to other groups, I couldn’t really seem to see much evidence to indicate what criteria the computer algorithm used to group people together.  Some groups (such as group 0) had a few more commonalities and connections between them than we did whereas other groups (such as group 2) had fewer.  Unlike in a search engine where context and repetitive occurrences can be derived and used to find appropriate links and connections, there are no defined parameters or commonalities to go from here, so the program is developing its own criteria to group people together.  This criteria is not immediately evident.

Emotive appeal and personal preference are not easily quantifiable entities and thus are not easily adaptable for an algorithm exercise such as this.

The 10 pieces of music that I chose for this assignment are:

1. Tchenhoukoumen Percussion – Senegal
2. Morning Star and Devil Bird – Australia
3. Cranes in their nest – Japan
4. Melancholy Blues (Louis Armstrong) – US
5. Beethoven’s 5th Symphony – Austria
6. Navajo Night Chant – US
7. Melanesian Panpipes – Soloman Islands
8. Wedding Song – Peru
9. Flowing Streams – China
10. Jaat Kahan Ho – India

I have played in community concert bands and sung in choirs.  I also have been involved with musical theatre, so this assignment was quite a pleasure for me.  The selection of these pieces was based upon the intent of representing as much of Earth’s cultural diversity as possible.  I quite enjoy listening and learning about the music of other cultures and countries, especially when they use instruments that are unfamiliar to me.  Music is a strong part of cultural identity, it has been used for recording history, sending messages, and for entertainment.

While listening to the podcast and going through the original 27 pieces, one thing that I noticed was the strong representation of music from Europe and North American (US).  Out of the 27, there were six selections from European classical artists (3 alone from Bach, and 1 each from Beethovan, Mozart, and Stravinsky).  While the podcast mentioned the reasoning behind the selections (mathematically significant, representative of human values), I wanted to make sure that the 10 that I selected were more diverse and representative of the different cultures, instrumentations, and vocalizations/choral elements through the earth.  I do have to admit that the selection of Louis Armstrong was somewhat of a personal bias because I like Jazz.  It is interesting that even though the cultures may be quite different, there are similar elements in some of the songs.  For example, I noticed that the ‘Flowing Streams’ track from China had some similar sounds to the guitar in ‘Dark was the night’.  The Peruvian pan-pipes seem similar to the flute played in the Cranes piece from Japan (although the type of song is quite different).

The difficulty with an exercise like this is that the selection of these songs is time-based meaning that if an extra-terrestrial species were to encounter this record, it would be a snapshot of Earth’s history, not necessarily representative of the current cultures and identities.  If that species were to form an image of Earth based on that record, the cultures and people that they would find here so many years later could be quite different.  Music is ever changing and evolving, just as humanity itself.

“New things require new words.  But new things also modify old words, words that have deep-rooted meanings.” (Postman, 1993 – chapter 1)

The task this week was to take our first assignment from week 1 and redesign it.  I have chosen to make a video using powerpoint and presented the objects in my bag as characters with a story.  In this video, you will hear them speak of their purpose and value to the owner (me).  I wasn’t able to upload the video file to the blog site (it was too big), so here is the link to it in my google drive…

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1O6tZaseXr-Ngcyx7su8AEkl8d5Ax11Ay/view?usp=sharing

Here is the viewable powerpoint if you prefer…

https://drive.google.com/file/d/12-43LWl845_hC_XOVNl1VOABFTbEHkWL/view?usp=sharing

And here is the pdf transcript of the video in case you have troubles understanding the audio…

Mode Bendiing Conversation

The first thing I noticed while doing this task is that one can include much more information in a more compact form when writing with text.  A video, although it may be more visually appealing and creative, takes more time and effort to incorporate the same amount of information.  If I was to include everything that I said in my first assignment, the video would have been much longer.  I had to refine my story so that the essential elements were included, but also needed to be mindful of the attention span and context of my audience to make it as accessible as possible.

Changing modes presents information in a way that allows one to communicate with a wider array of people.  We are not a homogenous society, but we are made up of people with a variety of linguistic strengths, cultures, and cognitive abilities.  As mentioned in the reading by The New London Group, “Dealing with linguistic differences and cultural differences has now become central to the pragmatics of our working, civic, and private lives…effectively using multiple languages, multiple Englishes, and communication patterns that more frequently cross cultural, community, and national boundaries.”. (The New London Group, 1996).  Nowhere is this more evident that in my classroom where students come from a wide variety of backgrounds with a wide variety of linguistic abilities.  I have always strived to make my lessons as multi-modal as possible in order to access as many learning styles as possible.  When I present a textual document, it is written with my own textual biases and knowledge.  When other modes are incorporated, particularly visual, it is more relatable.  “…the visual mode of representation may be much more powerful and closely related to language than ‘mere literacy’ would ever be able to allow.” (The New London Group, 1996)

This being said, I still had to use oral language in order to effectively present this assignment.  Knowing that my audience (teachers and fellow students in this class) is familiar with English, it wasn’t as difficult to incorporate the linguistic element.  However, if I needed to present this only visually (such as the emoji story), it would have been much more difficult.  Oral and written language add much more context and deeper understanding to the visuals.

References:

• Postman, N. (1993). Technopoly: The surrender of culture to technology (1st Vintage Books ed.). Vintage Books.
• The New London Group.  (1996). A pedagogy of multiliteracies: Designing social futures. (Links to an external site.)  Harvard Educational Review 66(1), 60-92.

The task this week was to write the title and plot of a story using only emojis and my choice was to choose a television show that I enjoy and write the title and then describe the main characters.  I have to admit that although I found this task interesting and enjoyable, I had difficulties with it.  I am a person who is very verbal, and I like to rely on text and words to convey ideas.  I find that I am much more able to effectively communicate when I have time to think, write and then edit my ideas into a coherent discussion.  This is one of the main reasons I really enjoy the affordances of a word-processor that allows me to edit/cut/paste as I go along.

I used my android phone for this task with the built in keyboard and available emojis, wrote the stories on the ‘notes’ app, and then screenshot it.  As I was trying to convey specific thoughts, I would actually use the ‘search’ in the emoji field to try and find an appropriate picture to convey my thoughts – so even though the assignment was about portraying ideas with graphics, I still used text to help with the task.  My difficulties may be a function of my age as I did not grow up using texting and emojis to communicate like younger generations so it does not come as naturally.  I find for myself that the most useful element of emojis is the facial expressions because they help to convey the appropriate and intended tone in my text messages.  For example, a text message saying “I would love to see that show” with a brightly smiling emoji attached is a totally different message than “I would love to see that show” with a puking emoji attached.  Other than that, if I want to write a message, text and words are so much clearer than pictures.

Did you rely more on syllables, words, ideas or a combination of all of them?

My process was to make a general list of the ideas that I wanted to communicate (such as character traits), and then try to find appropriate pictures to suit those traits.  Specific words are difficult to translate into this graphic form – for example, does an old lady emoji mean a grandmother, older sister, mother, etc.  Combined with other emojis, hopefully some context is added to increase the clarity of the intended message.  Context is critical for effective communication, and there must be a common understanding of the underlying context.  Does a picture of a broom mean that someone is sweeping a floor, or riding it as a form of transportation, or using it to chase away stray birds?  Different cultures may assign different meanings to different emojis.  For example, a red heart in our society generally means love.  Does it have the same meaning in an Ethiopian culture or a Mexican culture?  This reminds me of an episode called ‘Darmok’ in the TV series ‘Star Trek the Next Generation’.  In this episode, a species is encountered that speaks completely in metaphors and references to historical events, almost like they were communicating with verbal emojis.  When the crew of the Enterprise comes across this species, they are unable to understand anything because they do not understand the underlying context.  In the same vein, I have difficulty deciphering emoji messages without strong context.  “By the standard of phonetic writing, however, picture writing lacks narrative power.  The picture elements extend over a broad range of verbal meanings; each element means too much rather than too little.” (Bolter, 2001)

Did you start with the title? Why? Why not?

Although I initially had some difficulty choosing an appropriate story to portray, I did start with the title because it was fairly easy to represent pictorially with available emojis.  Then as I mentioned above, I listed character traits that I wanted to convey and attempted to find appropriate emojis to fit.  It was difficult because I would try and find a specific type of picture to represent my idea but it wasn’t available, so I had to find other ways to represent that idea.  I also tried to plan out the sequence of the emojis so that the context could be more clear.  The importance of logical sequence is expressed by Kress (2005), “The temporal and sequential logic of speech, and, leaning on speech, of writing, lends itself to the representation of actions and events in time; …The spatial and simultaneous logic of image-representation lends itself equally readily to the representation of salient entities and their (spatially expressed) relations.” (Bolter, 2005)

Did you choose the work based on how easy would it be to visualize? 

Partially, yes.  Since this is a TV show with multiple episodes, an entire episode plot would be extremely difficult to summarize with emojis, so I focused upon the character traits and roles of the main players finding representative graphics to convey concepts such as greed, alcoholism, etc.  Direct relationships between characters were more difficult to express.

In my opinion, emojis and graphics cannot replace text but only supplement it in order to clarify tone and intended meaning.  Without text, emojis have little to no context, and therefore are difficult to universalize.  “In the late age of print, however, the death of prose will never be complete, because our culture will want to keep the patient alive, if moribund, so that the mutual remediation with digital media can continue.”. (Bolter, 2001)

References:

Chapter 4. Bolter, J. D. (2001). Writing space: Computers, hypertext, and the remediation of print (2nd ed.). Mahwah, N.J: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. doi:10.4324/9781410600110

Kress (2005), Gains and losses: New forms of texts, knowledge, and learningLinks to an external site.. Computers and Composition, Vol. 2(1), 5-22.

This week, I have prepared for you a story written with the Twine interface.  It can be found here…

Marlis’ Week 5 Twine Assignment

The first thing that comes to mind when I think of Twine is the ‘Choose your own adventure’ books that I used to enjoy as a child.  One would read the story up to a certain point, and then one would have to make a choice as to the next step of the story; if you choose x then turn to page 12, if you choose y then turn to page 15.  Sometimes the choices would bring a quick end to the story, and other times the choices would continue the story much longer.  I used to go back and re-follow all the other choices so that I could find out what all the other possibilities were – sort of like being able to see all your possible futures depending on what choices you make at what points in your life.

The process of creating a twine (even one as small as this one) is quite a laborious task, it took a lot longer than I thought it would and I underestimated the amount of time it would take to create the short 21 slide story I ended up with.  “All writers have had the experience of being overwhelmed with ideas as they write.” (Bolter, 2001).  I needed to have a basic storyline mapped out beforehand, and then map out all the possible choices and links.  Once my story was roughly mapped out, I needed to go back and make sure that it made sense, and that there were no dead ends. Although no conventional ‘document’ was created, word processing skills were in use in that I could go back, cut/paste/copy and edit text as I went along.  The flow-chart design definitely makes the visualization and organization of the process much easier, illustrating the process Bolter describes when students “…sketch out topics and connect them through lines of association…”  I can imagine that with the right amount of time and coding expertise, one can come up with some very elaborate games (just like The Temple of No).  To be honest, this isn’t my first effort with Twine – when I took ETEC 565D (the gaming course), I created another one for an assignment – here is a link to it if anyone is interested… IP #3 Learning through Game Design

Hypertexting on a webpage makes things convenient for connecting to relevant and related information, but one runs the danger of ‘falling down a rabbit hole’, so to speak.  Bolter (2001) speaks of how each link leads to other pages that ‘…in turn lead the reader to other pages.  The process can continue indefinitely as the reader moves through a textual space. that…can extend throughout the Internet.”  There is so much information that is connected on the web that one can easily get overwhelmed.  News stories will often have numerous links interspersed within the article or at the bottom that can keep one clicking and reading for hours.  That being said, research is made much more efficient where one doesn’t have to go to a card catalogue and pull numerous volumes of books to pore over, rather relevant links in an article can save time where one need only click to access further information.  If I was to think of web-page hypertext links in the same way I thought of my childhood ‘choose your own adventure’ books, I would never be able to go back and explore every possible link.  There will have to be some choices left unexplored.

Oh, and the page that leads to the Zork game was a suggestion from my husband – it was a text-based game that he used to play.  In order to advance, one has to enter simple commands such as ‘open mailbox’, ‘read letter’, etc.  I thought it might be somewhat applicable.

References:

Bolter, J. D. (2001). Writing space : Computers, hypertext, and the remediation of print Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.