Rest of responses

Erol Morris Reading

In the article "Will the Real Hooded Man Please Stand Up" Errol Morris touches on the tragedies of Abu Ghraib, and essentially, how an image has the capability of building a story. Sometime during the war with Iraq in 2003, Abu Ghraib was where central intelligence agents of the United States violated various individuals' human rights by dehumanizing and torturing several of these prisoners of war. The original haunting images were released around 2003. Three years later, the New York Times came out identifying the individual in one of these photos as being the hooded man in the photo; when in reality, he wasn't. There were a lot of concepts from this article that, in the majority, had me thinking about the complexity of what is released and if we view them as true or not. But more importantly, what and how something becomes apart of history; and the perspective importance of it. This article mainly made me get a little upset in the way in which these tradiges seemed to be diminished and replaced with the issue of false reporting instead. Not saying that the problem of wrongly reporting information through a mass media source (such as the New York times) isn't essential, but I just feel like it took away from the real matter/issue at hand.

Other thoughts

-When these images got published they radicalized a whole group of people and gave the opportunity to point the finger at America for doing yet another unjust and immoral process.

You have to build something that comes close to the truth or it could have something that has nothing to do with the truth.

-over exemplify my stabbing photos vrs the true stories. (I found that most people don't like to hear the gory aspects of the actual story,

Laura Marks

Immanence (apposed to immense) she's arguing for immanence in a philosophical choice.

-Ray Curts wild (the singularity: computers gaining intelligence/consciousness —> something coming out and it's already outdated) (transhumanism)

This was an extremely philosophical article, like insanely philosophical. Not only did it introduce me to new concepts such as Marxism and photography being indexical, but it made me want to dive deeper into such writings from people such as "Deleuze and Guattari, Bergson, Peirce, and Bohm" that were referenced. This was one of the more open concept articles that we have read in the sense that with all the other materials, I would clearly favor a side of the author (almost as if it was a concept/idea that's difficult to hate). However, I couldn't even keep up with this one; I was way more lost in trying to figure out the terms that she was giving as if they should already be known. The article took on rather profound conceptual ideas that were more easily refutable (in my mind) because it's looking towards the possibilities of the future instead of the past. In a digital world, it can be difficult to imagine; whats next? And particularly with Marxism in mind, she states, "These works offer alternatives to the discourse of transcendentalism that animates corporate -futurist understandings of digital media." They insist that electronic media occupy not a "virtual" space but a physical, global socioeconomic space." This concept was my main take away from the article; a Marxist would say that if something doesn't materially benefit you, then it doesn't benefit you at all. But it's with the idea of reunification that this concept stuck in my mind. When treating something abstract as (or creating it into) a physical entity, the idea of what my time is worth comes to fruition. Are we selling our time and effort when applying for a job? And with the growing rate of population, clear skills and true identification as capable with a fancy piece of paper as such.

"The truth is that technologies age and die just as people do-they even remind us of our common mortality-and this is another fact that the myth of virtuality would like to elide."

This was an exciting concept that made me think about how quickly technologies come into or would just to become outdated in a year or so.

Marks: Materialism

"These works offer alternatives to the discourse of transcendentalism that animates corporate -futurist understandings of digital media. They insist that electronic media occupy not a "virtual" space but a physical, global socioeconomic space."

Xenofeminism Response

I simply love the verbiage of “emancipated” because women truly have been restrained in an America that claims all are equal. Clearly in such a diverse time where a range of ethnic and sexual identities are finally being seen as equal, women are still left behind somehow.  They are paid less to do the same exact job, constantly sexually satirized, and much worse.  After reading the XenoFeminism manifesto, I side with many of their ideas like that “Freedom is not a given—and it’s certainly not given by anything ‘natural’.” Or that if “nature is unjust, change nature!” I think they divided the line between radicalism and entitlement beautifully.  All should be created equal, and the XenoFemininist’s are helping to achieve that all are truly equal as should be. 

Given that there are a range of gendered challenges specifically relating to life in a digital age—from sexual harassment via social media, to doxxing, privacy, and the protection of online images—the situation requires a feminism at ease with computation. Today, it is imperative that we develop an ideological infrastructure that both supports and facilitates feminist interventions within connective, networked elements of the contemporary world. 

“From the street to the home, domestic space too must not escape our 

tentacles.”

-I really can’t believe how much the word “tentacles” has come up in this class, lol is it just me?  

“There is nothing, we claim, that cannot be studied scientifically and manipulated technologically.  This does not mean that the distinction between the ontological and the normative, between fact and value, is simply cut and dried. The vectors of normative anti-naturalism and ontological naturalism span many ambivalent battlefields. The project of untangling what ought to be from what is, of dissociating freedom from fact, will from knowledge, is, indeed, an infinite task. There are many lacunae where desire confronts us with the brutality of fact, where beauty is indissociable from truth. Poetry, sex, technology and pain are incandescent with this tension we have traced. But give up on the task of revision, release the reins and slacken that tension, and these filaments instantly dim.”

-I was actually surprising lost in this “adjust section” I saw them somewhat contradicting themselves but I may have misread.  What did y’all get out of this section of the manifesto?

If nature is unjust, change nature!

-powerful quote.