This is a small little post just because I saw this commercial on TV (while watching Scandal) and it really reminded me of something we talked about at the beginning of the course about new media icons and imagery being heavily inspired by old media.
You can watch the video here (embedding it didn’t work).
Happy Thursday!
Scarlett.
WARNING: this article contains explicit language.
http://www.wired.com/2014/10/content-moderation/
This article directly relates to our discussion on Internet censorship – especially the case we discussed in relation to child pornography. It is written by Adrian Chen, the same journalist we spoke about “doxx-ing” Reddit moderator ViolentAcrez (article here, )(rebuttal here). This is the story of Internet moderators:
“…companies like Facebook and Twitter rely on an army of workers employed to soak up the worst of humanity in order to protect the rest of us. And there are legions of them—a vast, invisible pool of human labor. Hemanshu Nigam, the former chief security officer of MySpace who now runs online safety consultancy SSP Blue, estimates that the number of content moderators scrubbing the world’s social media sites, mobile apps, and cloud storage services runs to “well over 100,000”—that is, about twice the total head count of Google and nearly 14 times that of Facebook.” (Chen)
I think this is very interesting, and important for you to be aware of, but again I warn that it does contain sexual and violent language.
First of all I would like to say that this is one of my favorite books books of all time- and it is of course running against some tough contenders.
This is not my first time reading this book, and now of course I am picking up on things I had missed before. Does anyone else think that Crake is responsible for uncle pete’s demise? I don’t think we’ll ever know for sure.
The thing I really want to talk about here is obsession- not Jimmy’s obsession with Oryx, but rather Crake’s fixation on jimmy.
Why does the extremely successful Crake keep coming back to (or for) Jimmy? Without Crake’s effort to keep in touch, the two would have lost contact long ago. It is partially Jimmy’s own feelings of inferiority- which colors the narration – that mind-bends the reader into thinking of Jimmy as lesser than Crake. Crake obviously does not think this way. Or rather, despite Jimmy’s numerous failings, he has what appears to be a genuine respect for Jimmy. Does Crake see Jimmy’s very well hidden but doubtless vast potential? Does he recognize Jimmy’s sarcastic genius? Or is Jimmy just one of the few people (maybe even the only person) that Crake considers his friend?
Characters aside, there are are some very interesting aspects of the future world that they live in that I find very interesting/strange.
First of all is the social hierarchy that is so different from our own. Scientists unfortunately don’t get the glory in our society. They certainly get the respect, but not to the extent that they do here. The students of Watson-Crick are considered the premier thinkers of a new world- but they are lacking in any kind of social skill whatsoever. Crake is not really an exception to this. Why have values shifted away from what they are now (entertainment, culture) to a super focus on technology?
In our world, experience and entertainment is one of the main parts of our lives- but here, such entertainment is outsourced to far away places (that are nonexistant in the eyes of the young viewers in the compound). Is the reason Jimmy and Crake watch such appalling internet programs because entertainment culture has vanished?
On another note, are Jimmy and Crake “normal” in their entertainment choices? In our world, this kind of graphic media certainly exists, but is consumed by a very small subset of people. So, even in this weird biotech-obsessed world, I don’t think that Crake and Jimmy’s choice of media is normal. It certainly is either a cause or result of many of their apathetic tendencies (I’m going to say result, but this is really an open debate).
Lastly, I want to talk about SoYummie Ice cream. Why, in this world of vast compounds and genetic engineering, is real food so rare? It would seem, from the context, that it simply became unimportant (as did the mysteriously absent entertainment industry), but in Watson-Crick it is described as a luxury. Why can’t they just grow more chickens on trees? Or better yet, why don’t they revert to the farming practices of old? they certainly don’t have moral objections.
Discussion question:
(Even though most of this post is made up of questions, I am still adding another one to the list.)
Oryx and Crake’s future world obviously does not match up with the trajectory of our society right now. So, for what purpose is the world skewed in this way? What is the message or satire here, or otherwise, why was it necessary in the story?
It’s interesting how much Oryx’s perspective of her life varies from Snowman’s and Crake’s. While one can say that both Snowman and Crake are intellectuals, Snowman tends to care about intrinsic values and emotions more than Crake. Crake is practical and emotionless, at least on the surface. So much so, in fact, that he doesn’t have much of a reaction when his mother dies in front of him.
Snowman remembers how he would badger Oryx into telling him about her background and childhood. As opposed to his privileged compound life, Oryx grew up in the third-world pleeblands; a world where children were sold routinely by their parents and ended up being slaves or pornographic actors. Her view, consequently, is that she’s lucky that her life worked out the way it did and that she’s now where she is. She doesn’t hold any grudges against the people who used her as a child, and Snowman can’t understand this. This relates closely to our current socio-economic divides because it is often difficult for upper-class individuals to identify with or even see from the same perspective as the less well off. Snowman is preoccupied by the little things: finding out who these people were and exacting some sort of revenge for what was done to Oryx. Oryx, rather, remembers the situation, knows that there were many that were much worse off than her and is actively working with Crake to fix larger problems in the world.
Something I found scary was the future of the internet. We’re constantly fighting for freedom of speech, press, etc., but what happens when the demand turns to wanting to see videos of immoral, perverse and disgusting acts? At what point does there need to be a certain aspect of regulation?
Lastly, I thought the pertinence of Snowman’s career to our class was uncanny. We live in a society where advertising is king and marketing is one of the most profitable careers to go into. I think Atwood accurately portrays the qualms and successive lack of fulfillment entertained by advertisers. What do you guys think about someone who’s job it is to mislead people or instigate desires in them? It’s often seen as a glamorous job where you get products before they’re released and meet famous people, but what is the cost on the individuals psyche?
Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake provokes a multitude of topics for discussion regarding our own society and where we are heading. One central aspect of the book, a necessary thread for its intended effect, is portraying characters with a severe lack of empathy or sensitivity in order to warn the reader about a possibly desensitized future society. For example, Jimmy publishes false words in his AnooYoo work and treats it like a game: “he’d come to see his job as a challenge: how outrageous could he get, in the realm of fatuous neologism, and still achieve praise?” (250). To an extent, this proves Atwood’s point: when reading about Jimmy’s manipulative treatment of women, his obsession with pornography, or his compulsion to lie in his writings for AnooYoo, I feel warned about people like Jimmy. In the back of my mind I am thinking of everything I can do to not become like him or to see who I know that is similar to him. However, when Jimmy and the other characters in the book are so lacking in humanity, like Crake’s distaste for Nature as a concept, I feel so drilled with the negativity of these characters that I just start to hate the characters instead of contemplate their environment. I get so busy hating Jimmy that I feel almost blinded to the commentary presented in the novel. Jimmy is definitely a product of an unfortunate situation, but I feel like it is easy to blame him for all the problems in the book instead of the world he exists in.
One aspect of our second reading of Oryx and Crake that I found really interesting and thought-provoking was the way Oryx differed from the rest of the children that had been sold into sex slavery and child pornography. When Oryx’s story is first told, I was shocked by her lack of anger or distress over the horrible things that had happened to her. When Jimmy becomes upset upon hearing about Jack’s abuse of Oryx, she replies: “‘Why do you think he is so bad?’ […] ‘He never did anything with me that you don’t do” (141). While reading this I was beginning to think that the common traumatic psychological effects of abuse were being ignored for the sake of having some sort of dream girl to be Jimmy’s love interest. However, when Jimmy’s second discovery of Oryx is told, it is revealed that her strangely positive view of her situation was abnormal for children in her same situation. Some of the other girls said they’d “been drugged,” “smuggled in container ships,” or “made to perform obscene contortions” (254). Whether they are true or not, these girls’ stories are more evident of the kind of trauma they suffered than what Oryx accounted. Compared to them, Oryx is strangely content. It is comforting to know that Atwood recognizes the true effects of abuse, and I am interested to see how Oryx develops considering her strange emotional history.
Why does Jimmy love Oryx so much? Could it be because he feels like he can fix and protect her when no one could protect him? Is it because she is beautiful? Is it because she loves him? Could it be any combination of these, or something totally different?
As I continue to read Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, more and more of me just wants to know what happened “before”, what happened to the relationship between Jimmy and Oryx and Jimmy and Crake, why isn’t the book called Oryx and Crake and Snowman? These questions about uncovering the backstory to Snowman’s life and the backstory to Jimmy’s life probe my further reading.
One aspect of this book that sticks out to me is the way that The Children of Crake were materialized, showing intense planning by Crake himself to eliminate functions of humans he deemed useful. I tweeted about how I thought the way they acted was very removed, they were built logically and thus their “human” instincts removed many of the evils we know today. This is most notably shown in the way Atwood describes how The Children of Crake have sex. Crake made many “adaptations” to the human brain and body and adapted many features of other animals, such as the transformation of blue skin to symbolize arousal from baboons. This manner in which sex was regarded was much more of an “athletic demonstration” (165). This new way of reproduction thus eliminated prostitution, sexual abuse of children, sex slaves and rape, all things that are prevalent today and are hard to prevent although many efforts are present.
This also gives us a little clue to how the world Atwood is describing was formed. Seemingly all known humanity was wiped away and Crake manufactured a new human race built from the ground up. Taking away the unwanted features of humans and adding in adaptations from other animals “As Crake used to say, Think of an adaptation, any adaptation, and some animal somewhere will have thought of it first” (164). These designer humans display the qualities of an idea human in Crake’s mind.
Professor Licastro responded probing that in this logic is creativity, humanity and passion lost? I believe so. The way Crake has manufactured these humans removes the expressive nature of human life we treasure today however it seems to eliminate many unnecessary evils. This begs the question of can a balance be struck between the two? Is it possible for humans to adapt a new way of living to progress and eliminate such things as rape and sexual abuse?
Happy Wednesday Class!
For your free-writing activity today, please respond to one or both of these two questions posed to you on Twitter:
While you are writing, please have your collection of previous free-writing exercises from the first half of the semester ready for me to collect (or email me the link).
Here is a data visualization of our #nyufyws tweets:
Check out the top tweets and tweeters. Click on any node and it will show you a summary of their tweets. Click on “Replay” and it will recreate the conversation. Pretty neat right?
It is run from an archive of our tweets I have created, and automatically updates every hour. You must include #nyufyws to have your tweets included.
I thought that the Dean’s Roundtable with Brian Sirgutz about using digital content to drive social change was interesting because of his diverse background. Starting out managing bands, Sirgutz wanted to own his own record label. However, after many ups and downs, Sirgutz decided that the music industry wasn’t for him. On September 11th, 2001, Brian’s world changed forever. His apartment was near the twin towers and once the wreckage set in, he witnessed the potentiality of people and humanity as society rallied together. Setting up food stations, Brian worked to make a deeper impact in the lives of many. Brian urged society to “take off the mask, your face is glorious” and realize that humanity will be better off if everyone is true to themselves.
On 9/12 Brian realized that he wanted to help people and make a difference. Once the wreckage was cleared, Brian wondered how you continue with the story after the news cycle is over? I think this relates to our class because we are discussing how media can impact society. Therefore, media could spurn further conversation about a news item. This led him to his carrier as Senior Vice President of social impact and social innovation at the Huffington Post and AOL. Reinventing the idea of a journalist to become a citizen journalist, Brian allowed everyone to convey the urgencies of disaster. When he was in Haiti after the earthquake, he saw a news reporter who was recording from her iPhone. This sparked an idea about having a larger team of news reporters who can cover more news. Taking in sponsors, such as Johnson & Johnson, Brian created the Huffinton Post impact section. His one condition for the sponsors was that they couldn’t advertise in the section, but can donate the space to non=profit partners and put their mission statement there. Brian realized that social issues and positive news were shared twice as much as regular news and this sparked his creation of the impact news section. When citizen journalists are blogging about a topic, the world is becoming more engaged in an issue. Even when only using the latest affordances of technology, such as the iPhone, citizen journalists can have a part in the news cycle. Brian Sirgutz revitalized the way that American’s interact with the news cycle and consequentially digital media. With his Gallatin education, Brian merged thought processes that didn’t typically belong together such as music and technology. This led to his new thinking about merging new media and the news cycle. I think that we can learn new ways of thinking from Brian and take his examples of merging new media with news forums to inspire our final projects. This idea of taking new, existing technologies to revolutionize an existing process combines two things that didn’t previously coexist, which is what we are trying to do in our final project. Brian also inspired me to not be so set on one idea or career path and let my path become malleable by society. By giving in to the ebb and flow of society, we can create new technologies and help a greater set of people.