What has Digital Cultures Taught Me?

Before I came to university I wouldn’t have had any idea what the unit ‘Digital Cultures’ would have contained. If I were to give it a shot, I would have thought it was based solely on things surrounding the internet, and how in a way it’s become our culture. If I was to answer with just that, I would have been awfully incorrect…

In fact, digital cultures covers many things, from ethics to gaming and cyborgs to immersion. As well as being taught all these new things, which I’ll go more in-depth with later on in this post, it has encouraged me to question things more and helped me see both sides of certain pictures rather than just one. As I hope you can see in my blog posts…

I would say that I think digital cultures is a very good thing for university students of this day and age to study, because it’s about looking at advances in technology and how we got the technology we have now, as well as being able to incorporate things that young people do on almost a daily basis, such as gaming and logging onto social networking sites.

 

Facebook - A daily staple for many a student.

The first thing I posted on here was one of the very first things me and my classmates learnt about in digital cultures, Jürgen Habermas’ theory the ‘Public Sphere’. I won’t lie and say that I had heard of this concept before learning about it in class! Although looking back on that first post it is quite rubbish and doesn’t do the subject justice. Although I hope as my blog posts have gone along there is a noticeable improvement on my articulacy and style of writing, and of course not forgetting that I hope my post’s have become more interesting to read as a whole (wishful thinking, maybe?!).

Throughout the weeks of this course I’ve been taught about and how to critically look at digital maps and location detection systems (such as google maps and facebook places, are they invading people’s privacy? etc.).  One of the subjects I enjoyed blogging about the most was ‘News Games’. As I’m on a Journalism course, I found it to be a very harmonious mixture of news reporting and gaming, usually put into one lovely comical bundle.

News Games: A mixture of pure gaming, citizen journalism and satire?

Like I mentioned, digital cultures encouraged me to notice the way that particular technological items, such as a mobile phone, have changed in a relatively short space of time. For example, 20 odd years ago a mobile phone was a little bigger than the average brick (an average brick in my mind, anyway), now phones are super tiny and super slim-lined and unlike the ginormous mobiles of bygone days they’re able to text, take photographs, access the internet, download applications and many more things that people wouldn’t have been able to comprehend when mobiles first made an appearance on the digital scene. We (when I say we, I’m referring to my classmates and I, just to make it clear) also discovered the world of augmented reality, which I think is very likely to become the future of gaming, and maybe even other things such as selecting television channels and setting the time on your microwave. We’re already seeing augmented reality being applied to video games, just look at the Nintendo Wii and the xBox Kinect for example.

 

Beth's perception on a brick.

Another interesting subject we covered was the issue of identity on line. Can you really trust who you’re talking to on line if you don’t know them in the flesh? It was intriguing to study the different forms of identity people create online, people can lie about themselves and who they are, but when people play games, particularly on MMORPGs, a lot of the time they have to pick between a selection of different races, classes and specialities which will then be their identity on that game, it’s still them, but not their real persona.

One of the most complex things we studied with the biggest human impact was the matter surrounding copyright online and access to open source software. We covered things from people getting in serious legal ruts with massive companies over downloading only a couple of songs over the internet and whether it is right or wrong that people aren’t allowed to re-use a copyrighted song, for example, and making it into something of their own (usually in the form of a mash-up, which is most commonly a multitude of songs all mashed into one over a funky beat). We also learnt about the opposing side to copyright, the ‘copyleft‘ camp and what they do. I will also make another shameful confession that I wouldn’t have been able to describe to anyone what ‘open-source’ was before taking this digital cultures unit. Now I know about it, I think it’s a good idea that would prove beneficial to a lot of people, especially people who can’t afford a decent system operator on their computers (Linux), a word-processing program (OpenOffice) and anyone interested in animation, but can’t afford the massively expensive animating suite (Blender).

 

OpenOffice: The Open-Source office suite

To most people, the world of robots and cyborgs is still a long way away, well, that’s not what we’ve been told after being taught that, pretty much, cyborgs are alive and kicking, and they’re just like me and you. Not so many decades ago, cyborgs were the things of cheesy 1970s American TV series and Sci-Fi programmes. But, what is a cyborg? A cyborg is someone who has some form of technology helping them function rather than the original human body part (for a example, anyone with a hearing aid could probably be classed as a cyborg).

 

The Real Bionic-Woman?

As this is my very last post (as far as I know, anyway), I look back on digital cultures fondly and I’m glad that I took a subject that is so interesting and diverse.

Identity, Robots and Artificial Intelligence

As time goes on, more and more questions are being asked on whether we can make a robot or a system that is just as mentally capable as human beings are. This indeed would be a hard feat to achieve, seeing as the human brain is often too complex for some people to even comprehend, we have a huge variety of emotions and instincts that is practically impossible for anyone to replicate.

The development of an artificially concious entity may happen within our lifetimes - Robert Pepperell, The Post-Human Condition

For a short start, what actually is artificial intelligence (AI)? According to the book ‘New Media: A Critical Introduction’, there are two types, classical AI and connectionist AI. Classical AI is simply concerned with creating exact human intelligence in a machine, whereas connectionist AI (aka, ‘neural networks’) is centred around machine intelligence alone, even if it doesn’t totally resemble the human mind.

When reading up on AI in machines, you would be forgiven for wondering if it is actually possible for a machine to think for itself and have it’s own identity? This question has been subjected to debate openly for over 50 years, when Alan Turing published ‘Computing, Machinery and Intelligence’, the paper questioned such things on how we as humans think and the philosophy behind thinking itself. This report lead onto the Turing Test, which can test a systems capacity to show any kind of intelligence.

Is it possible that machines already have a small bit of intelligence, and is it likely that you’ve already encountered an example of a computer thinking? A common instance of a computer simulating having its own mind are the various ‘chatterbots’ that can be found easily on line. Chatterbots are programmes that have been made to simulate a conversation. One of the first chatterbots was ‘Eliza’, which was created in the mid-60s and was enhanced in the early 70s. Eliza was programmed to respond to questions of a psychopathic nature,  and works via the use of scripts. However,  Eliza’s intelligence is very low and whenever someone ‘confuses’ the script the reply they receive usually doesn’t make sense making it clear that Eliza is just in fact a computer programme rather than an actual independent intelligent being.

Eliza the Chatterbot

However, there are more modern chatterbots that simulate human conversation much more effectively than Eliza. An example of one of these would be Alice (according to her site, A.L.I.C.E The Artificial Linguistic Internet Computer Entity), with whom you are able to have a much more intelligent and varied conversation with than Eliza. Again, if you happen to mention something that the machine can’t comprehend then it is made clear that Alice is also just a computer programme without any real potential for intelligent thought (you can also follow a link on the site to talk to a chatterbot version of Captain Kirk, which is slightly more entertaining).

Even if you haven’t ever came across a chatterbot in your life, it is quite likely that you have encountered some kind of ‘bot’ on line at one point or another. There can be bots found in computer games, especially MUD’s/Dungeons where they’re set up to play and can pretend to be human. There is also the infamous ‘spambot’ which is commonly found in emails, they start their journey on webpages extracting peoples email addresses later sending them spam.

“There are many computer programmes called ‘bots’ that have been written to log into MUD’s and pretend to be human” – LivingInternet.com

Chatterbots are all good, but are there any other examples of computer intelligence that can be accessed by anyone? Whenever you play a game vs. a computer that is an example of your computer thinking and trying to make the best action it can to defeat you. A good example of this is the chess match now known as ‘Deep Blue vs. Kasparov’, which was a match between world champion chess player, Garry Kasparov and a computer Deep Blue, which won.

Although computers can do all the things described relatively independently, are there some human qualities that a computer just cannot replace? None of the examples I’ve used are very good at showing basic human compassion, or been able to react to simple questions with much depth. On top of that, none of the examples seem to have very dynamic personalities, apart from the entities that are based on well known characters, i.e. Captain Kirk.