What are the details of our daily existence? What systems dominate our lives? What meanings can we make of our situation?

This social studies/humanities course will steal from various disciplines - including anthropology, critical theory, cultural studies, economics, futurology, history, philosophy, political science, psychology, and sociology - to help us make sense of our situation.

A major goal of the course will be to focus your attention on your own life. Together we will investigate major systems that create and rule our lives including capitalism, school, family, popular culture, and the US government. And we will figure out how to interpret our lives, and these systems, and the collision of our lives and these systems.

We will detour into the future and the past but our journey will be primarily contemporary.

Thursday, October 29, 2009

The History of Representational Devices

In this unit - Digital - I started by thinking we were exploring our current addiction to electronic-digital-representational devices. Through reading blog posts it has become clear to me that "its not the phone - its the friends on the phone." Thus, the real obsession isn't the tool, it is what the tool provides - the chance to experience chosen aspects or simulations of reality - to open ourselves to particular sources of information, entertainment, and communication - immediately and magically and entrancingly.

So, this final "handout" is a timeline of when these modes of re-presenting (or simulating) reality were invented. I don't mean this to be a final word - just a starting point for your own thinking and research!

Prehistoric Representations of Reality - The Ability to Experience (Sometimes the Same Way Twice) That Which Isn't There And Maybe Never Was!
  1. Awareness
  2. Imagination
  3. Dance
  4. Language
  5. Story-telling and chant
  6. Painting & Sculpture
  7. Theater
  8. Song & Music
  9. Optical Telegraphs - such as smoke signals!

Historic Representations or Simulations of Reality
  1. Written language
  2. Printed Stories and Poems and Novels and Non-Fiction
    3. First woodblock printing around 200 PE
  3. Telescope and microscope - first lenses around 800
  4. Recorded sound - 1st machine sound maybe 800s - first recorded and replayable acoustic sound around 1878 (the phonograph)
  5. Photography
    6. Camera obscura - ancient - first permanent photograph 1825
  6. Telegraph - Representing the language of a reality far away, almost instantaneously - 1833
  7. 3D Pictures - 1838
  8. Telephone - 1876
  9. Movies - 1878
  10. Radio - Big controversy over who started it - but around 1894
  11. TV - 1934
  12. IMing - 1960s
  13. Videogames - First commercial success 1971
  14. Mobile stereos - First the boombox in the mid-70s and then the Walkman 1979
  15. Shared computing - 1978
  16. Online Social Networks - 1985
  17. Internet Browsing - 1987
  18. Texting - 1989
  19. Mobile Phones - 1991 - My father had an early second generation model
  20. Mobile computers with internet access - The smartphone in 1993?
Three questions came up while I was researching this post.
What date should I use for the timeline - invention, commercial use, mass use? I didn't come up with a good standard.

What counts as a "representation or simulation of reality"? Perfume? Furs? Special gardens that are remade every year?

Finally, what is it about these representations or simulations of reality (variously defined) that is so fascinating for us? Is it partly because our consciousness is itself a kind of representation of reality?
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