Life on the Screen - Sherry Tuckle

DATABASE AS A SYMBOLIC FORM - LEV MANOVICH
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ MUDS – TrekMUSE LambdaMOO

Multi-User Domains, with a greater accuracy, Multi-User Dungeons

The multiuser computer games are based on different kinds of software (this is what MUSE and MOO or MUSH part of their names stands for)

Windows provides a way for a computer to place you in several contexts at the same time. As a user, you are attentive to only one of the windows on your screen at any given moment, but in a sense you are a presence in all of them at all times.

Your identity on the computer is the scum of your distributed presence

The unitary self / the self relating to many units (is an illusion)

(Modernist culture) of calculation toward a (postmodernist culture) of simulation

we have leaned to take things at interface value

we have become accustomed to opaque technology

After several decades of thinking: “What does it mean to think” the question at the end of the twentieth century is ‘What does it mean to be alive’?

The changes in the intellectual identity and cultural impact of the computer have taken place in a culture still deeply attached to the quest for a modernist understanding of the mechanisms of life

Biology is appropriating computer’s technology’s older, modernist models of computation while at the same time computer scientists are aspiring to develop a new opaque, emergent biology that is closer to the postmodern culture of simulation

The dynamic, layered display gives me the comforting sense that I write in conversation with my computer. After years of such encounters, a blank piece of paper can make me feel strangely alone

The computer offers the illusion of companionship without the demands of friendship

We construct and are constructed

We construct our technologies, and our technologies construct us and our times. Our times make us, we make our machines, our machines make our times.

We become the objects we look upon but they become what we make of them.

The ceremony and the ensuing celebration produce photographs and videotapes that displace the event and become our memories of it

Manipulation and recombination

Seeing the copies as a reality

Worlds without origins

Little pieces of string that he tied into complex knots whose configuration he took to symbolize the workings of the unconscious

The notion of alienation presumes a centralized, unitary self who would become lost to himself or herself. But if, as a postmodernist sees it, the self is decentered and multiple , the concept of alienation breaks down.

the self is decentered and multiple , the concept of alienation breaks down.