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Class Notes for Monday, 2/14/11
Class Notes for Monday, 2/14/11
Review of the readings:
Turkle: online gender-bending and its art
Hausman: transsexuals engineer themselves
Parens: loss of authenticity when parents shape their children?
Reactions as we wrap up the readings & this section of the class:
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Turkle caused Franklin20 to consider agency & gender identity online.
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Do we go online to play out the real self?
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LeaMirella: we do play out our real selves because cyberspace allows you to play out an extension of yourself
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The question of authenticity: does having surgery to change your body (unnecessarily) result in a loss of authenticity?
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That depends on our definitions of normal... “normal” is an extremely narrow category that excludes most people and which can't help us define what is “acceptable”
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Is normal separate from authentic?
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Two different sides to authenticity: biological and internal
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Authenticity is beaten out of you early on
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It's hard for many people to understand body discomfort without having gone through it
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Parens suggests we are all authentic already; Hausman says authentic is much less defined
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How do we define authentic? As original, or new and unique? Our definition will change how we approach the issue
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Maybe authenticity is not aesthetic achievement but instead an empowering agent of change?
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What about agency vs. social pressure in the performance of gender?
New section of the course: The Science and Technology of Information/
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What is “information”? What forms does it take?
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We already redefined gender … now let's redefine information
After listening to a noise band and some Beethoven, our class reactions:
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Disliked the noise band because there was no discernible pattern
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Some only knew it was music because of the context in which it was experienced – so perhaps the context in which we receive information affects our understanding?
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One suggestion was that the perspective of artistry is relevant and that there is no more information in the noise band than in Beethoven
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Information is filtered based on preexisting knowledge
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What is white noise? What's sound? Sound has a whole range of frequencies, and when the amplitude of all of those frequencies are the same, then static is created – what we call white noise
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What affects how we process information? Is it observation of pattern, previous experience, context?
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If a pattern is not discernible, does that mean it automatically lacks one? Or merely that we are unable to discern the pattern?
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Is information merely noise?
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Is noise unpleasant to hear, or does that also depend on the individual?
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Is noise merely “oral”? Noise can be felt too
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Is noise a sensation, or is it an interpreted pattern? Perhaps meaning is drawn by the person listening
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Stimuli, interpretation, noise all need definitions for further discussion
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Noise and information: differences of interpreter?
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Information could be just a subcategory of noise and depends entirely on context: it's whatever is presented to us
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Information is merely an organization of noise to attain meaning