Robot Apocalypse

A few years ago, the computer science department at our university was holding a “computer science day” to recruit high school students. During this time, I was assisting a professor in the Computer Science department who had received a grant for five robots to develop a multi-agent system paradigm. My job was to help program these robots so that they could communicate with each other to avoid obstacles, navigate around a room autonomously, and be controlled remotely by an operator. These were simple tasks to accomplish, and were the early stages of a much larger project.

The robots look like the machines pictured in this post. Human appearance was not reflected in the design – just a machine that cruised around on wheels. Each robot contained six sonar sensors. With a little bit of programming, the sensors allowed the robots to determine the distance between them and an obstacles in their path. This helped the robots communicate with each another to avoid collisions when navigating autonomously. If a human wished to intervene, we designed a touch-screen tablet that an operator could use to control the robots remotely, and the human could see what they “see” through a webcam mounted on the robot. This allowed the operator to navigate the machines around even if he or she was not in the same room.

We gave this technology to high school students during computer science day, because the robots were fun to use and we thought students would find them entertaining. During the demonstration, sometimes the robots' sonar ping would travel through a wall and hit the studs, throwing off the distance the robots calculated between themselves and the wall. As a result, the robots sometimes rammed into walls at full speed and made a few (additional) holes in Faner Hall.

The emotional impact on everyone was different. High school students, and us, winced when the robots slammed the wall, but for different reasons. Unlike the high school students, we didn't want the robots damaged primarily because they were expensive. The robots also had value to us because we spent a lot of time working with them. Nothing more. The robots were simply machines. It wasn't the same “feeling” of being intensely connected with non-living objects, as many individuals described in Sherry Turkle's book Alone Together. The robot was programmed to conduct simple tasks, and it just needed to work at the end of the day.

The high school students in attendance felt a bit different. The ability to control the robots was exciting, and they didn't want to lose a source of entertainment. Some high school students probably saw a robot slamming against a wall as serious excitement, especially when it created a new hole. When our robots had a collision, the unintended disruption caused many high school students to want to take control of the robots. A connection developed between the people wanting to compete over who could operate the robots most effectively, and not necessarily the connection between humans and machines themselves. In this case, the technology helped facilitate bonding and built friendships in the form of competition. It was healthy. To the high school students, I suspect watching the robots accidentally slam into the walls was a healthy and safe way to relieve some aggression indirectly – similar to why people watch boxing or aggressive sports. I also suspect that if Sherry Turkle was reading this post, she would probably express her legitimate concern to me and disagree completely, claiming these actions are destructive to society.

Later, when the robots were navigating autonomously, we programmed them to avoid obstacles and each other. Students often took this as an opportunity to walk into a group of robots operating autonomously, curious how the machines would react. As expected, the robots tried to move quickly out the way and avoid the students and each other, but the students also had to move to avoid them in the chaos. Both the operator and the robot would manipulate each others actions in a response to a disturbance. The high school students seemed to enjoy this the most. Perhaps it was the mystery of the robot that they found intriguing. It makes me question if the “connection” that Sherry Turkle mentions between humans and robotics would remain once the novelty diminished. Much like a human relationship, it's likely to get boring if it remains predicable. As a programmer, I knew how the machine would react, so perhaps my perception of the robot was different than what the high school students felt.

We also programmed the robots to follow people that came within a certain distance. The robots provided attention to the high school students and responded to their behavior and interactions by following them. When the occasional pedestrian member passed by too close to our demonstration, the robots would stop following the high school students and would begin to follow the pedestrian instead. At first it was amusing because this was completely unexpected. Innocent bystanders were suddenly in control of our robots. Some bystanders were anxious because they accidentally influenced the demonstration. Others enjoyed being the center of attention. Realizing this, students began to compete for control over who could get the most robots to follow them. It was a competition, and connection, between people... not humans and machine.

This robot demonstration was on my mind when reading Sherry Turkle's book Alone Together. As programmers, when the robots hit a wall, sometimes we just felt bad because of the potential loss of value in the robot and the time put into it. It was like a car... we work hard to pay for our vehicles and feel terrible when they get rear ended in a parking lot. We felt the same when the robots had a collision, which is why I found it so difficult to relate to Turkle's stories. When students had the attention of the robot, there was a feeling of satisfaction because of the human interactions that took place. These interactions were facilitated by the use of technology, and it was healthy – even when things went wrong. When that attention was lost, there was disappointment. Communication, even with objects, can play with our emotions in many unexpected ways. The outcome isn't always terrible, either.

Defining Online Education?

A look at the back cover of Matthew Hindman’s The Myth of Digital Democracy will tell you how his book works to debunk the popular mythos of the Internet working to diversify political discourses. Drawing heavily on empirical data gathered from search engines and hyperlink analysis, Hindman attempts to show his readers that despite popular belief, by-and-large, Americans are not using the Internet to actively seek out political content. According to Hindman, when we do finally tear ourselves away from the would-be graveyard of Myspace, or, take a break from trolling for porn in order to actively seek out political content, the websites that we’re visiting are more than likely controlled by the same old dominant elites.

Our classroom and online discussions have led us to surface a reasoning flaw in Hindman’s argument, namely, his narrow definition of “political discourse.” We’ve pushed back on his analysis by asking, what happens when the porn that you look at is influencing your political commitments, and/or your political commitments are influenced by your porn? Or your DIY crafting blogs? Or your Netflix queue? After all, as many of our own feminist political commitments teach us, the personal is political (So maybe, just maybe, my recent Victoria’s Secret Google search, which Hitwise Competitive Intelligence no doubt tracked, has everything to do with my politics—especially if I’m looking to buy some bras to burn at my next feminist political protest).

The personal IS political!

Beyond the debate of the Internet revolutionizing American democracy, there is that other hotly contested issue of whether—for better of for worse—the Internet is revolutionizing education. Some of the literature we’ve encountered (Bejerano; Allen) seems to take a cautionary stance toward online education, conceptualizing online education in a fairly narrow, functional sense of either independent distance learning, or information and communication technologies (ICTs) as merely supplementary to traditional classroom instruction. The cautionary tone of the literature seems rooted in a concern that ICTs—despite their rapid advancements and increasing conveniences—simply cannot replicate the traditional ways that we’ve conceptualize and approached education. Ultimately, I’d argue that these articles are correct: online education can’t replicate traditional approaches to education, but only in the same sense that Bob Dylan’s transition to the electric guitar could not replicate his traditional folk music.  Which is to say that with the advent of online communication, traditional education can never be replicated. In my opinion, attempts at doing so are fruitless, but not necessarily for the functional reason the literature has laid forth, but more, so for conceptual ones.

With all of our discussions of online communication—whether we’re discussing robots, politics, or pedagogy—I keep noticing our group’s collective movement to question the literature’s passive construction of particular definitions, particularly as we find them to be both too narrow and too broad. We’ve pointed out that Hindman seems as unreflective in his narrow definition of political discourse, as Sherry Turkle does in her ambiguous articulation of identity—one that seems to problematically conflate an authentic identity with a static

one. In keeping with this movement, and to return to my initial discussion of online education, I’d like to tease out a discussion of online education from a the perspective that is more interested in tending first to how ICTs might conceptually or theoretically alter education, rather than beginning first with issues of functionality.

What is online education? Depends on who you ask

But in order to do so, I first need to take a bit of a detour.  One day in class we considered which characteristics we’d seek out in the perfect robot-friend. One joking response was, “I won’t have to explain to My Robot Buddy what performance studies is.” We laughed at this as an absolute criterion for a robot-friend, but I certainly identified with the frustration behind the sentiment, especially after having tried to explain—unsuccessfully, and in any variety of approaches that I can think of—to my extended family and non-academic friends, just what the heck it is that I’ve been studying for the past 7 years. More often than I’d like to admit, I’ve resigned myself to knowing that many of them think that performance studies is “kind of like theatre, but not really.”

Are you performance studies?

The trouble for me is, again, one of too vague or too specific of definitions. Any time I try to go past that shallow conceptualization, I find myself saying awesomely pretentious sentences like, “the interdisciplinarity of the field is a performance in and of itself. One that reflects back the always shifting composition of any particular phenomenon that one might choose to investigate.” Selfishly, I don’t want my friends and family to think I’m a jackass. And, my general experience is that most people seem to prefer either really narrow or really broad definitions, because that middle ground—where we spend our time playing with definition—takes too much time and too much work.

But I’m keen to think about Turkle’s research (just maybe not her analysis of that research) and how the pervasiveness of ICTs might be changing how folks orient to that always shifting middle ground—particularly, as online communication can contribute to shifting identities, fractured subjectivities, and slippery definitions. And I can’t help but think about that shift as educational—a more conceptual kind of online education, if you will.

Turkle shores up several examples of how online communication is altering folk’s coherent and fixed notions of time, space, and identity.  She offers the very useful metaphor of the cubist art movement as way to understand how communication technology is shifting our perceptions (63). Expanding on this metaphor, she explains cubism as a simultaneous presentation of multiple perspectives. The Internet, with its multiple windows and latticework of complex linking systems—in conjunction with various other globalized technologies (cell phones, email, text messages, and instant messaging)—expands our stable sense of self, space, and place by presenting these various perspectives simultaneously. While Turkle seems to lament this shift, nostalgic for the less complicated days of yore, I’m inclined to see it as a pedagogically productive approach for explaining performance studies to my Uncle Gary.

This is an example of cubism?

This isn’t really my Uncle Gary?

All of this is to say, that how ICTs contribute to perceptual shifts in our collective sense of reality is a rich site for thinking through questions of online education, communication education, and performance studies. With regard to these perceptual shifts, feminist pedagogue Carmen Luke, works through new media’s inevitable effect on students. Like Turkle, Luke agrees that increasingly students will not know of a reality outside of the compressed and reorganized world presented to them through Internet technologies. But in a departure from Turkle—who seems agreeable to sequestering a globalized reality—Luke argues that out of fairness and perceptual continuity for students altered realities, we must embrace online education inside and outside of the classroom. Incisively, Luke points to the traditional classroom as “one of the few places . . .used to discourage student from blending, mixing, and matching knowledge drawn from diverse textual sources and communications media” (398).

So, while we might not be immediately inclined to include Internet meme’s combining various tweets and interviewed gems of Charlie Sheen “bi-winning” and “Tiger blood, Adonis DNA” as part of the introductory university course, we should stay open to expanding our approaches to and definitions of education, by embracing multimodal pedagogies that reflect changing perceptions of our students.

Works Cited:

• Allen, Terre H. “Is the Rush to Provide On-Line Instruction Setting Our Students Up for Failure?” Communication Education 55.1 (2006): 122-126. Print.
• Bejerano, Arleen R. “The Genesis and Evolution of Online Degree Programs: Who Are They For and What Have We Lost Along The Way?” Communication Education 57.3 (2008): 408-414. Print.
• Luke, Carmen. “Pedagogy, Connectivity, Multimodality, and Interdisciplinarity.” Reading Research Quarterly 38.3 (2003): 397-403. Print.

Nostalgia's Privilege

Everyone gets nostalgic sometimes.  I know that I get nostalgic when I think about having dinner with Grandma every Friday night when I was a kid.  She made the best spaghetti, and after we ate dinner, we would always watch Cops and then nick@night.  Thinking about those nights with her always give me this little pang in my heart area; they are happy memories, but they carry the bite of something I cannot return to.

On the other hand, I know now that dinners with Grandma carried a risk I wasn't aware of.  Namely, radium poisoning.  See, my grandmother was one of the many women in Ottawa, IL, to work at the Radium Dial Company or Luminous Processes painting radium dials.  Though not my grandmother's fault, her body was inundated with radiation, which spread to her clothes, her bedding, her home, her family... See the problem?

But nostalgia isn't about the complicated and messy realities of our past.  It's about "a wistful or excessively sentimental yearning for return to or of some past period or irrecoverable condition;" it's about a longing to return to a past that is "often in idealized form."  On its own, there isn't anything wrong with that.  It's probably pretty normal to maintain some feeling for a part of your life that felt enduring, and in so doing became naturalized.  It is easy to forget that it wasn't all rainbows and unicorns.

The issue with nostalgia is when it gets employed as a form of evidence. Nostalgia often takes the form of argumentum ad antiquitatem, a fallacy also known as "appeal to tradition."  Nostalgia allows us to bask in the happy glow of those days of old when the grass was greener, people spoke proper English, political dialogue leading to consensus happened in coffeeshops all across the country between diverse citizens, and everybody loved each other so much that they sat down to dinner every night with no distractions to engage in enriching family conversation in which every person could be an equal participant.  Errr, um, well... that's how it was right?


Yeah, not so much.  And that's exactly the problem with nostalgia: it erases histories of privilege, difference, dissent, violence, and oppression.  

So why bring it up in this context, when we're talking about digital/virtual communication?

Sometimes just typing in the search bar can tell us a lot.

Notice how only one of those "common search terms" has a positive connotation.  In so many of the critiques of the use of communication online, writers have argued that it is some how less... less smart, less engaged, less social, less human.  Less than what, though?  What we used to have, of course!  These arguments rely on comparisons to the past, a past that is seen through the lens of nostalgia.

In a piece written for The New York Times, "The Twitter Trap," Bill Keller writes:  

The shortcomings of social media would not bother me awfully if I did not suspect that Facebook friendship and Twitter chatter are displacing real rapport and real conversation, just as Gutenberg’s device displaced remembering. The things we may be unlearning, tweet by tweet — complexity, acuity, patience, wisdom, intimacy — are things that matter.

In his piece, he seems to be emphasizing that in the use of these technologies, we are losing something.  Implying, of course, that there ever was something to lose, and more, that these practices can't act as additional literacies instead of replacement ones.  Apparently, conversation via these technologies are "faux," "illusory," "reductive," and "redundant."  After all, #TwitterMakesYouStupid.  You obviously can't express complexity or intelligent thought in less than 140 characters, because obviously communicating those things that make us "essentially human" requires long form; that's how we've always done it before!  In that way, his arguments end up being pretty similar to - if thankfully more brief than - Sherry Turkle's new book, Alone Together.  

In many ways, his critique reminds me of some of the arguments presented in the debate about the use of African American Vernacular English (or ebonics) in Oakland, CA, in the 90s.  For those who don't want to comb through all those links, essentially, the schools in the area wanted to begin treating Ebonics as a language in order to improve the education of students for whom that was their primary dialect.  The idea was that through an emphasis on code switching, students would be able to better comprehend material, learn "Standard English" more effectively, and work with teachers who were trained in their dialect in order for the two dialects to be additive and complementary to the students' educational practice.  In other words, ya know, treat these students' culture with respect even though it wasn't *gasp* white.  Oh the horror!

The arguments against the attempted policy change were numerous, but most focused on assumptions that this method of communication was just plain inadequate.  Commentators often made claims (see links above) that it would hurt the kids because when they tried to go into the "real world," employers would think they were ignorant based on how they sounded.  People expressed concern that the children would appear uneducated, sound annoying, and be unable to use "proper" English.  If we let them use Ebonics, they'll never learn "proper" English! You obviously can't express complexity or intelligent thought in Ebonics, because obviously communicating those things that make us "essentially human" requires proper English; that's how we've always done it before!

Both Keller's argument and the argument against Ebonics in the school system assume that there is a traditional way of doing things (ex. long form, face-to-face communication, so-called "proper" English), that these traditions are stable, and that this traditional way is the best way.  The question neither addresses is: what did the traditions they want to cling to normalize, and at whose expense?

This is slightly easier to answer in regards to the Ebonics controversy.  Firstly, the idea of "proper" English assumes that language practices are stable.  This is patently untrue, or else British and American English wouldn't differ so greatly, and we'd all be reading The Canterbury Tales as it first appeared.  More than that, though, the assertion of a "proper" English implies one that is decidedly American, masculinist, white, and highly educated.  By emphasizing a perceived lack in regards to Ebonics, commentators reify normative ideas about what gets to count as knowledge, as well as which culturally-specific communication practices have value.  In other words, the insistence on "proper" English erases the importance of difference, as well as the context for the historical development of such difference.  What the school children in California witnessed in this debate was the public denigration, regulation, and dismissal of non-normative methods of communication; they were told, in not so many words, that their culture was stupid.  In order to access public discourse, they were told, they had to discipline their communication.

Now, the arguments against Twitter certainly don't carry the same weight of history as the racism inherent in the anti-Ebonics claims.  But the logic is functioning in similar ways.  Keller's nostalgia leads him to paint a picture of the past in which everyone spent hours a day in rapt contemplation and deep conversation, where arguments were civil and logical, and we shared "a sense of community connected by something deeper than snark or political affinity."  His article boldly declares that he finds a very particular kind of communication valuable, and Twitter is not that kind because it "makes smart people look stupid."


First of all, the assumption that everyone just magically had a bunch of extra time to sit around all day reading books and pondering life's great questions is ridiculous.  The fact is that the harder information is to access, the less people are going to access it.  To assume that one's access hasn't always been tied to class, education, gender, race, or even location is to deny the underlying privilege in the assumption.  Maybe Keller or Turkle has had time to sit around memorizing books and crafting long, handwritten letters to people.  But I never have.  The erasure of class difference is astounding in how the issue of time spent gets handled.

Bill Keller

It seems to me that Keller has forgotten what he has that so many don't: he's white, he's male, he's got money, he's relatively attractive, and he's in a heterosexual marriage.  He is the epitome of the normative ideal.  The community he says we're starting to lose has always been his.  The rules under which we defined rapport or intelligence or conversation or civility - all of this was crafted and maintained by a system that privileges people just like him.  He doesn't seem to realize that the rest of us have had to code switch for him all along.  That doesn't mean he shouldn't have the right to speak to his experience, but it does mean that he would stand to lose very little in our nostalgic time travel.  It's a privilege to be unreflexively nostalgic.


I don't want to fall into a fallacious appeal to novelty here, so keep in mind that I'm not saying all the changes in technology are intrinsically good just because they are new.  But clearly the threat they pose to normative ideals about communication practices is a real one.  Twitter and other social networking sites are something new, and they bring with them both the fear of change and the exciting possibility of it.  In our critique of these new practices, we have to be careful that our nostalgia doesn't blind us to a history that is rife with disagreement and inequality.  We have to remember that communication practices change over time, that they are culturally specific, and more, that certain practices are valued more than others - often in ways that continue to silence minorities.  And maybe that is the way it's always been... but it doesn't have to be.