Robot Writing

Does real life interaction outweigh online interaction? If so, then by how much? How can we quantify the growth of a relationship, the growth of a love, in either case, and then compare the data? Is real life interaction really more significant than online interaction? I'm not really sure. Technology has had a profound effect on the way humans communicate, and an equally drastic effect on the way we communicate privately. Email, Myspace and Facebook messaging/chat, PMs and DMs, text or SMS messaging, (dare I mention AOL Instant Messenger or, if you'll indulge me, SnapChat?) have all changed the way that we think about intimate communication. Conversations can last for seconds or for days. A story from my own experience: When I was in high school, I went to a bakery/café with one of my friends, and her friend. Let's call them Eliza and Beth, respectively. I was meeting Beth for the first time that evening, and wanted to get to know her more and spend time with her i...

If you've had access to the internet any time within this past week, it's likely that you came into contact with this film:   Directed by LA-based filmmaker Tatia Pilieva, "First Kiss" is an intimate short film that offers a real view of the rarely-seen first kiss between two people. This provocative video has received an impressive amount of attention, garnering over 36 million views within the first three days of it being posted to youtube.  I first came across the video via a Facebook post that linked this article  at Gizmodo.com , an article with which I can totally get down. This film is beautiful. It shows human beings in a moment of vulnerability and giddy discomfort and follows their transition to a moment of confidence and joy, using a kiss as a catalyst. A kiss does that . A kiss does all of that.  This article  from Jezebel.com (as well as a choice few of my Facebook friends) has beef with this video, lamenting the fact that th...

To save you the trouble of watching the really-not-so-great-in-terms-of-quality youtube video , I'll just quote Will Smith's 2005 Nickelodeon Kids' Choice Award speech here: "The key to life is running and reading....W hen... you’re out there and you’re running, there’s a little person that talks to you and that little person says, “Oh, I’m tired, my lung’s about to pop, oh, I’m so hurt, I’m so tired, there’s no way I could possibly continue,” and you wanna quit. ...If you learn how to defeat that person when you’re running, you will learn how to not quit when things get hard in your life. ...The reason that reading is so important: there have been millions and billions and billions and gazillions of people that have lived before all of us. There’s no new problem you could have (with your parents, with school, with a bully, with anything), there’s no problem you could have that someone hasn’t already solved and wrote about... in a book.” I have a dis...

Clay Shirky, the author of Here Comes Everybody , writes, "When we change the way we communicate, we change society." This is the legend on the map. The cypher.  As I'm sitting in a library, I see form influenced by function. Book shelves are lined so that people may pass between them, scanning titles and call numbers. Each shelf has a long, rectangular space in which many books can be placed. Each book is a rectangle folded around flat, rectangular pages. The form or shape of each of these structured objects is a direct result of its function. Things are shaped the way they are because of the task they preform. Chairs must have a surface that keeps our butts off the ground, and their shape falls victim to that aspect of their function.  This opposite true of communication. The form of our communication shapes the function. For instance: a book is a medium of communication. The form of it, the pages and spine, lead to its function as shelf matter. (That's not ...

What is it about human culture that makes us gravitate toward binaries? We thrive in the realm of ‘black or white,’ ‘male or female,’ ‘good or bad,’ ‘us or them.’ And it’s the last one, us or them that is presently causing me the most grief. Is it the fault of our language, or the fault of our thought processes as determined by nature or physiology, that leads us to rely so heavily on categorization as a means to organize and understand our perception of the world? People love groups. We love to group things. This is this type of thing. This is that type of thing. They are this type of people. There are some pretty basic incarnations of this often limiting habit: grocery store aisles, restaurant menus, a phonebook (if anyone remembers what those are.) The danger in accepting this worldview as the norm is not its necessarily inclusion, but exclusion. By including filet mignon on only the ‘dinner’ section of a restaurant menu, we are saying “filet mignon is neithe...