Updates to homework and due dates
I forgot to mention today that I am still working on grading your essays, and I will return your essay #2 in class on Friday.
For FRIDAY: respond to my post below on Dreyfus's essay "Disembodied Telepresence." The blog is due Friday rather than Monday so that you will be prepared to discuss the reading in class, and so that your weekend is clear to work exclusively on your papers.
For MONDAY: class will take the whole 2 hours between 4-6pm. If you haven't already formally done them yet, write a close scene analysis and close reading of a passage that are important to your final essay. These should help you to dig deeper into the evidence, both to help you narrow your topic or theme and to provide support for your interpretations and claims. Bring these to turn in with 3 copies of your rough draft.
Also bring Writing Analytically and the Dreyfus essay to class on Monday.
posted by Irene Chien @ 10:10 AM
4 comments
4 Comments:
“Without an experience of their embodied successes and failures in actual situations, such [distance] learners would not be able to acquire the ability of an expert who responds immediately to present situations in a masterful way.” (68)
From my reading of this passage, Dreyfus criticizes a person’s ability to master a skill solely by observing the skill in practice. There is something missing when a pupil learns a lesson taught through a TV or computer screen; this lost factor is the personal contact with the teacher. It is absolutely necessary for an apprentice to be in the presence of his master in order to fully gain experience in a specific field. Without his master at his side to correct him or criticize him, an apprentice will never develop the intuition to handle real life situations.
As a student in a webcasted class at Cal, I agree with Dreyfus’ take on teaching through technology. When I “go to class” and watch a lecture online, it is definitely more difficult to pay attention. It is tough to feel engaged in the class when I am in the comfort of my own home; too many things distract me from watching and listening to the professor. I can only imagine how difficult it would be to acquire a skill through such means.
“But even though interactive control and feedback may give us a sense of being directly in touch with the objects we manipulate, it may still leave us with a vague sense that we are not in touch with reality” (55).
Dreyfus’s argument points out a critical error in today’s technological society. While we rely so much on these interactive control and feedback that seem to present us a perfect view and representation of a situation, we are also left with a void. We use technology to feel a sense of control of machines, but this control causes us to be in one world, away from reality. We don’t even interact with the real world. I think this is an interesting point because our interaction with the real world is based on technology and the Internet – its depiction of a situation through the idea of telepresence. Dreyfus basically argues that telepresence does not amount to the essence of an experience, the essential component of reality. This seems to go back to Kracauer’s argument in Photography. In the same essence, photographs and interactive robot control both help humanity experience the presence of reality of the past and present. However, we are left with a hole that leaves us feeling as if something is missing. And something is– our interaction with reality.
“Without our constant sense of the uncertainty and instability of our world and our constant moving to overcome it, we would have no stable world at all” (63).
Dreyfus criticizes technology for taking humans away from experience and contact with the world. With robots and technology in between direct experience with the world, it seems as if we are playing a video game. We’re controlling the actions of sprites or robots, moving across a screen without ever experiencing any of the events on the screen. Because we know we will not suffer any consequences or direct impacts, this eliminates any fear and uncertainty in our choice of actions. Dreyfus suggests that the elimination of fear and uncertainty, humans will not make any strides to push the limits of human capabilities and unknowns or grow reckless or lazy because of lack of consequences. Therefore Dreyfus believes the world will cease to function.
Reading this essay brought me back to Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. The wealthy Mars inhabitants would never have to work a day alongside the androids. As a result, they will never understand the grueling work conditions they subject the androids to, and continue with their reckless course of actions.
“What is lost, then, in telepresence is the possibility of my controlling my body’s movement so as to get a better grip on the world.” (65)
In this sentence, Hubert L. Dreyfus attempts to explain why using a computer or television screen to interact with another human being or to learn a concept this way can be insufficient or inadequate. Dreyfus says that the reason this type of interaction is not the same or the reason that it lacks the same effect that face to face interaction causes is that it does not provide the ability to control one’s body movements. It also does not allow a person to achieve a full understanding of the mood of a situation or to understand the surroundings present where an event is really taking place. According to Dreyfus, if the ability to control one’s body movements is lost, then one loses the ability to react to another person’s movements or emotions. This also does not allow a person to get a full grip on the world because it doesn’t allow them to absorb the whole situation; it doesn’t give them the chance to take in everything that might be present at a real interaction or location.
Some of the concepts in this particular sentence that were a bit unfamiliar or confusing at first were the words “telepresence” and the phrase “a better grip on the world.” I had never heard of telepresence before, so it took a little bit of further reading into the essay to deduct that it means to be present at a location through a television or computer screen. This is possible by having a camera film your face or body and then have a computer or television screen show your image at a distant place where your presence is required. This could also mean having the image of another person or just the real location where you wish to be also shown on a screen in front of you, so that you will also be able to see where your image is being broadcasted. The phrase “a better grip on the world” I later thought to mean to absorb as much as possible from an event as possible. This would mean that cyber or telepresence does not provide this because you miss out on the actual reality of being present at the real location.
I think this essay relates to some of the themes seen in the movie Family Viewing. The theme of having an actual occurrence recorded so that you can be present at the real place for the first time or once again through a television screen is explored in both this essay and in this movie. As seen in the movie, recordings or images through a screen are not the same and are certainly not sufficient enough to convey the same effect that the ability to be present at the actual location at the time when the event is taking place will have on a person.
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