eXistenZ 2: Repetition and Symbolism

Although eXistenZ is far from my favorite movie, I can appreciate the intellectual constructions and metaphors included in the film for their worth, without actually liking the film itself. Certain aspects of eXistenZ present interesting questions about life and society as well as gender roles and free will. These questions as well as the film’s overall message are illustrated by the film’s use of rhetorical tactics.

Some of the rhetorical tactics featured in eXistenZ are repetition and symbolism. These elements work together to make the film’s message both clearer and more persuasive. Repetition is an important tactic used in the film in order to call the audience’s attention to certain elements and to highlight particular scenes or events that are significant. For example, the phrase, “Death to the Demon(ess) [whoever the game creator is at the time]” is repeated several times throughout the film. This repetition calls attention to the idea that the person who creates a virtual reality separate from actual reality is a demon and should be destroyed. Also, Allegra repeats multiple times that the only way she can see if someone has damaged her game is to play it with “somebody friendly,” while referring to Pikul. I’m not sure if this is foreshadowing that Pikul is not somebody friendly because he is her intended assassin at the end of their time in the eXistenZ game, or that he’s not friendly because he is a killer outside of the game as well. These elements add to the characterization included in the film as well as its overall message of what is significant.

eXistenZ also uses symbolism to convey its main point. All of the technologies featured in the eXistenZ virtual game are made out of flesh and bone, or at least look like human or animal parts. These images contribute to the message that in this setting, man and machine do not only co-exist but they are intertwined. There is no separation between meat and metal in this environment, especially with elements like the “bioport” and the gun made out of flesh and bone.

I think these aspects of the movie are intellectually stimulating, yet I think the film creators went about it the wrong way. Although this film is not meant to appeal to the general audience, the inclusion of such graphic images and grotesque scenes made it difficult to focus on the overall message, in my opinion. My question is: do you agree? If so, how could the film be improved so that it maintains the same message while generating more mass appeal? Or, would a more appealing film dilute the message it is trying to convey by taking away the shock factor?

S/R Paper 3: eXistenZ

In his film, eXistenZ, David Cronenberg presents a world where it is hard to distinguish between reality and a virtual game. The plot presents many twists and turns for the viewer, so it is hard to decipher exactly what happened, especially with the ambiguous ending. The film begins with the introduction of people participating in a trial run of a virtual reality game, designed by Cronenberg’s main character Allegra Gellar. She is introduced as the world’s best game creator and her new game, eXistenZ, is operated by a pod that connects into a player’s spine through a “bioport.” When the trial run begins, a man shoots Allegra with a gun made out of amphibian bones with human teeth for bullets. A marketing trainee for the company, Ted Pikul, helps Allegra escape the scene and the two of them go on the run from “Realists” who have a bounty on Allegra’s death. The only copy of her masterpiece game exists on Allegra’s pod, which has been damaged by the gunshot. In order to figure out if the game itself is damaged, she needs to play with “someone friendly,” which turns out to be Pikul after she convinces him to receive a bioport. When they play the game, they meet many characters who lead them to different places like a factory, a mutant farm, and Chinese restaurant, where Pikul makes a gun out of his ordered “special” and has the urge to kill Allegra. He kills the waiter instead and later on, he tries to kill her because he is a spy for the Realists. Allegra claims to have known this already and had injected a bomb into Pikul when she was “curing his infected bioport.” Allegra apparently wins the game with the deaths of the other characters, but is unclear if she is in a game or in reality. At the end of the film, viewers find out that all of the film’s characters are actually people participating in a trial run of a new game, tranCendenZ, and that Cronenberg’s main characters are actually people ideologically against tranCendenZ. Allegra and Pikul take real guns, hidden under a dog’s fur, and shoot the real game designer, saying he should suffer for creating the “most effective deforming of reality.” Before they shoot another participant, he asks, “Wait tell me the truth, are we still in the game?” The ending is left up to the viewer to decide if the characters are in reality or if they are still in some sort of virtual game.

eXistenZ, both the film and the game, serve as a metaphor for everyday life in our reality. The film’s main argument is that social constructions, ideologies, and cultural programs have coded our perception and cognition just as much as computer programs and technological games do. Pikul comments that “free will is obviously not a big factor in this little world of ours” when talking about their game lives because of the many processes they have to go through to get from one point to the next. Allegra responds, “like real life, there’s just enough to make it interesting.” Everything we experience is perceived through the lenses that others have forced upon us and no one is ever actually experiencing an independent “reality” with total control over their lives in this age of cultural influence and technological advancement. At one point, Pikul tells Allegra that he is uneasy and uncomfortable in his virtual game surroundings because the “rules and objectives are unknown” and that he’s “always being exposed to unknown forces that we don’t understand, that could kill us.” Allegra responds that this is “a game everybody’s already playing.” In reality, we are all exposed to dangers and we never know what will happen in the future, so we are already playing the game of life every day. The life in eXistenZ mirrors reality by making a rhetorical point about how people live their lives and view their existences. In eXistenZ and in real life, “you have to play the game to find out why you’re playing the game” because no one gives you all of the answers at the beginning and you don’t know your goal in life until the end, if you figure it out at all.

The New Digital Divide

In Marcia Stepanek’s The New Digital Divide, she discusses the contrast between what people hoped the Internet would provide and what it does currently. The old digital divide used to be interpreted as an exclusion of access to the Internet because of the cost of a computer and the limits on use for people without one. Now that almost everyone has access to the Internet, the new digital divide involves a separation between what the hopes of the Internet would be and what it is becoming with a surge in social networking sites and corporate filtering.

The hopes of the ideal Internet include a forum for social change, where a person could participate in any kind of conversation or interaction and wouldn’t have to be limited by social constructions. “In the early days of the Web, social innovators predicted it would spawn a more open and democratic society” (Stepanek). The idea of the new digital divide involves a division of people and purpose on the Web instead of the old idea of exclusion to access. Companies that shape the Internet have begun using filters and customization methods to point people in the direction of things they have already searched for. “Trouble is, these new levels of data-personalization, along with the growth of social networks that we use to self-aggregate, are threatening to hamper civic engagement” (Stepanek).

This threat on civic engagement is due to “hashtags” that are “being used to collate and segment different conversations by topic [and] also may be keeping many people out of the social networking site’s most popular and/or important conversations” (Stepanek). So without these “hashtags” on the Internet, it is easier to see and find different viewpoints from one’s own by chance. With these hashtags, the Internet is leading us away from this opportunity by directing our search results. Influential Internet companies are making it easier to live in a world where we only interact with people similar to us and are not exposed to differing opinions or experiences.

This problem has further reaching implications. For example, there is clear racial segregation on the Web and on social networking sites like Twitter. This fact is “[…] starting to keep us from being exposed to a surge of new information and ideas -- and chiefly, viewpoints that may differ from our own” (Stepanek). We don’t always choose these segregations either. “Often, these "filter bubbles" keep information from us without our specific permission -- and worse, without our knowledge” (Stepanek). Stepanek concludes that “we must work harder to break out of these self-imposed (or machine-imposed) comfort zones if we're to affect social change” (Stepanek) and that we need to make the Internet a more hospitable place for social engagement. We also need to dismantle hierarchies that are encouraged by social networking sites and the like. The Internet was not created as a forum to transfer societal perceptions, biases, and constructs into a new setting. The early hopes of the Internet involved a more democratic society.

My question is: since many people don’t realize that this process is occurring (where people are not as exposed as they used to be to differing opinions on the Internet and that hashtags and customization methods are occurring without our knowledge of it), should there be legal implications involved? Should the government start restricting companies like Google and Facebook and leave the control back in the consumer’s hands?

Augmented Reality: Facial Recognition?

Honestly, I am a little torn with the issue of Augmented Reality, or AR. I think this kind of technology is extremely intriguing (and cool), but I also think that it can be a detriment to our privacy as individuals and as citizens. It’s hard enough to control what goes on the internet about you because of Facebook photos that your friends upload and blogs people may mention you in, but if that information is available without real effort from someone else (it just shows up when someone points a phone at your face) I think that could be a potential problem.

On the one hand, these smart phone and computer applications make the transmission and retrieval of information, pertinent or not, more easily available to the public. It eliminates multiple steps involved with retrieving information, taking most of the effort out of the entire process. A positive result of this fact could be that more people get involved with politics or other important issues. With the availability of information and with its ease in transmission, people can actually see how political decisions affect them individually. For example, one application “lets you point your handheld and get an overlay on the screen that shows how bailout dollars have been spent in your neighborhood” (Benkoil). Seeing how money is spent in your area, with a specific application, at the time that you think about the subject can help people grasp how vague political concepts directly apply to their lives. The fundamental principle of democracy is involvement and AR could potentially get people more politically involved.

Also, AR can help save, or at least partially repair, the floundering of the print magazine industry. People in the industry have been searching for ways to keep print journalism from disappearing and have yet to come up with a definitive answer. “Other AR applications can live on computers, like one Esquire magazine plans to use next month that will let readers hold the December issue up to their computers’ cameras to get moving images of what they’re reading, such as an actor removing layers of clothes for a fashion story about dressing for the weather. Turning the magazine will trigger other actions, The Wall Street Journal reports, such as making it appear to snow” (Benkoil). These are extremely smart ideas, if they catch on, because they force the consumer to buy the print version of the magazine as well as going about their normal processes of online interaction. AR could be a solution to the crumbling of the magazine industry by becoming the “direct mail of the 21^st century” (Benkoil).

On the other hand, the availability of information without effort can lead to loss of jobs, especially middlemen type jobs. Real estate agents could lose their jobs because with these apps, a person looking for an apartment in a certain area only has to go around with his or her smart phone and can talk directly to sellers without involving an agent at all. The number of travel agents has declined in the past years with the Internet and the ease of personally booking reservations and finding deals. This AR technology will make processes like this even easier.

In addition, AR technology seems very invasive of privacy on multiple levels. “How about facial recognition software to give information about a source a journalist is talking to?” (Benkoil). That seems like an informative idea, but it also seems like an invasion of privacy and of personal rights. Anything about facial recognition technology gives me the creeps and I don’t think anyone other than our police forces and CIA should be able to use that kind of technological capability. Isn’t that illegal, anyway? The fact that gliches haven’t been solved in these kind of technologies furthers my suspicion that they won’t work properly and could be a major detriment to someone’s life.

Do you think that the whole-hearted acceptance of these kind of technologies, especially facial recognition technologies, encourages our society to view actions that are previously thought of as creepy and stalker-ish, to become more the norm instead of the exception?

S/R Paper 2: Neuromancer

In his novel, Neuromancer, William Gibson illustrates a futuristic world where there is thin line between man and machine, or 'meat and metal.' Gibson’s main character, Case, is a former virtual cowboy, who “jacked into a custom cyberspace deck that projected his disembodied consciousness into the consensual hallucination that was the matrix” (5), until he stole from his employers. His employers, in retaliation, damaged his nervous system with mycotoxins (6) so that he could not continue doing what he does best, which is corporate thievery in cyberspace. “Case fell into the prison of his own flesh” (6) and he became a drug addict in a wasteland, until he meets Molly and Armitage. Armitage is a shell of a man named Corto, who is the sole survivor of a purposely failed, government mission called Screaming Fist. Molly is a bodyguard who is physically upgraded through technology. Armitage offers Case a way out of his cyberspace-deprived living by temporarily fixing Case's nervous system, so that Arnmitage can use his hacking abilities. The team’s run on the corporation Sense/Net, results in the successful heist of the ROM construct of McCoy Pauley, or “Dixie Flatline.” “…Think of the Flatline as a construct, a hardwired ROM cassette replicating a dead man’s skills” (76). The Flatline and Case work together in the matrix to complete subsequent missions in Istanbul, Zion, and then Freeside, and also to find information on Armitage’s boss. Case discovers Armitage is working for Tessier-Ashpool’s, AI (artificial intelligence) named Wintermute, who contacts Case on multiple occasions through people in Case’s memory and causes Case to flatline. Wintermute’s main objective is to merge with another T-A AI, Neuromancer, so that it can become more intelligent, something usually prevented by the Turing police. “…What you think of as Wintermute is only part of another, a shall we say, potential entity” (120). Riviera, a holographic drug addict, and Maelcum, a Zionite, become members of the team and help infiltrate the Villa Straylight, Tessier-Ashpool’s headquarters. Their mission is successful and Wintermute merges with Neuromancer to become “the matrix” (269).

What I find interesting about this text is the concept presented about the creation of another self in cyberspace. In Convergence Culture, Jenkins touches on this subject with his discussion of an online and offline persona. In Neuromancer, cyberspace itself is described as an experience much like the human reality. Regarding simstim, “the cyberspace matrix was actually a drastic simplification of the human sensorium” (55). The novel presents the idea that one’s personality can be copied and can exist in another dimension or medium that differs from reality. The first representation of this idea is the introduction of the ROM construct of Dixie Flatline, a being that is dead in the bodily, human sense, but is still ‘alive’ in cyberspace. After Case asks the Flatline how he’s doing, Dixie Flatline responds, “I’m dead Case. Got enough time in on this Hosaka [computer] to figure that one (105). The Flatline’s only desire is to be erased at the end of the mission. Case mentions the Flatline’s non-laugh that gives Case a creepy shiver down his spine because it is an attempt at laughter but is an eerie sensation instead. In the end of the novel, Case sees his own copy in cyberspace that mirrors the Flatline’s ROM construct. “Linda still wore his jacket; she waved, as he passed. But the third figure, close behind her, arm across her shoulders, was himself. Somewhere, very close, the laugh that wasn’t laughter” (271). Even though Case’s connection to Linda Lee is extremely strong throughout the novel, Case chooses to leave a virtual eternity of RAM construct happiness with Linda Lee on a majestic beach to return to his bodily reality. In this instance and in others in the novel, I think Gibson is trying to illustrate an age-old belief in a drastically new way or setting. In my opinion, Gibson is showing that mortality is a defining factor of human existence and that it is better to live a full human life and die than to live a half-life in eternity.

Neuromancer, post 2

""Can you read my mind, Finn?” He grimaced. “Wintermute, I mean.”
“Minds aren’t read. See, you’ve still got the paradigms print gave you, and you’re barely print literate. I can access your memory, but that’s not the same as your mind”” (Gibson, 170).

I think this exchange in Neuromancer is fascinating because it has so many possible implications or interpretations. When first reading the passage, I thought that it was interesting that Wintermute referenced the “paradigms print gave [Case],” which I took to mean the norms in thinking and processing that we all acquire from childhood teachings. Wintermute then goes on to say that Case is barely print literate, which would be hard for my parents to envision, but is sadly getting easier to imagine with the disintegration of print journalism, the popularization of electronic text, electronic books, and basically electronic everything. It’s intriguing to think about a world where print literacy is obsolete, but I guess that’s the kind of world that Gibson is creating for us through his descriptions and writing style.

In addition, the above passage mentions the clear distinction between memory and mind. Since the introduction of Dixie Flatline into the story, I have been conflicted about the whole concept of ROM and RAM construction and how a person’s entire personality could possibly be recorded or transferred onto a machine. I had come to the conclusion that this was just science fiction and that this process could not be possible because one important aspect of being human is the fact that we grow, learn, and change our perspective on things because of our human experiences. If my personality was transferred right now into a construct, there is no way that the construct would remain being “me” electronically, because I’m not going to be the same person in five years. My mind is going to change with the new memories I make from my future human experiences. So, I think it’s interesting that even though Gibson indirectly reiterates his question of what is human or what is alive, the real question is, if it is alive, who is it?

Neuromancer, Ch. 1-9

The thing that really interests me about Neuromancer, by William Gibson, is the way Gibson redefines the relationship between technology and nature. As we discussed in class, this novel sets a tone from the beginning where technology is used to define nature instead of the other way around, in language, description, and narrative. Many authors provide a physical description of their characters to match or be similar to aspects of the character’s personality, but Gibson takes this idea a step further with his futuristic take on physical appearance and its new partnership with technology. I find it really interesting that the Modern’s suits change colors like a hologram, reflecting their personalities as being extremely multi-faceted and susceptible to passing trends and fads. They are only looking out for themselves and their suits show that sentiment by projecting alternative visuals to different people at certain times or angles. Another example, Molly, has a quick, strong, and sharp personality, clearly represented by the piercing blades that come out of her fingers. She is also a little vulnerable and strives to stay in control, which is parallel to her use of glasses that are surgically encased in her head.

One aspect of this novel that interests me is its attempt to distance itself as far away from the current reality as possible, yet it still projects some age-old associations. Even with its changed, advanced environment through technology, some associations remain intact and even encouraged throughout the book. For example, religion and terrorism are inevitably linked. From the Crusades, to the Inquisition, to 9/11, terrorism has been historically linked to religion in our reality. In Neuromancer, the Moderns use the cover of a militant Christian sect to scapegoat the chaos that takes place in Sense/Net. Also, this novel is supposed to be set years and years in the future, yet the middle eastern treatment and view towards women is the same or similar as it is currently and historically. This is exemplified when the Armenian is surprised that Case and the Finn have informed Molly about their plan of action and also his shock of her high involvement in the mission. I would think that in a world where the written language has become obsolete, these old associations would disintegrate or at least become passé.

With his inclusion of these associations, was Gibson just including certain ideas that would make his far-out novel become more relatable to the current reader, or do you think that he meant something else by including these little asides? If Gibson didn’t mean anything by it and you think my question is irrelevant, my other question would be: how do you think accepted trends, social norms, or historical associations would break down with this sort of advancement in technology? Would our society change dramatically with the drastic change in the way we relate to each other and with the giant leap in technological creation? What ideologies or accepted beliefs would break down and which ones would persist? It’s impossible to tell, but interesting to think about. What’s strong enough to last?