[-empyre-] Virtual Embodiment: week 3

[John Hopkins]

Hi Tamara --

It's a big responsibility to introduce technologies to a child!

> part of their world, their mind and their experience - there is little
> distinction between self and other and rather a synthesised world emerges for
> them.  Many of the children had a readiness to give up the 'I' of their
> selfhood in order to work collaboratively with the technology - it became
> part of their perceptual and e xperiential field, again suggesting integrated

This probably arises as a function of the need/tendency to play ('make believe') 
as a 'natural' extension of childhood/evolutionary learning strategies. And is 
perhaps quite independent of a particular 'technology'. 'Taking on' a 
contemporary technology is only 'different' in its degree of flow changing power...

When a child picks up an object and turns it into a 'make believe' toy or 
companion in play, it is quite a different intensity of process of picking up an 
ipad that is packed full of protocols that are subtly 'directing' the play. 
Those protocols, in their power to direct embodied energy (life!) are 
non-trivial, and I would suggest that in their subtlty, they are more 
problematic in their ability to 'direct' the social development of the the child 
than less complex technoogical devices. In the case you describe, the presence 
of "a larger avatar" to "encourage" the children to move "in creative ways" 
seemed to be a crucial point in the process.  A less complex device, say a stick 
that is turned into a horse to ride, carries practically none of those 
techno-social protocols (some, still, to be sure, in the fact that for a child 
to do such a thing now, they would have to be exposed the concept of horse-back 
riding in some context!). In the case you were observing, the exitence of a 
dominant character directing their play is a wildly different process of play, 
imho... perhaps not even play at all, but simply another set of directed 
activities that our system is substituting for play on a broad scale for 
children generally.

Once the child adopts a techno-social protocol (in childhood) it will be a 
'natural' extension of their awareness and 'being' (the fish-knowing-water 
situation). This dependence is both a benefit and a danger, depending on what 
level of techno-social system they are dependent on. I would suggest that our 
general level of dependency is becoming so complax and so beholden to 'hidden' 
actors who are creating and forming protocols of human relation as to be a huge 
risk to to continuance of wider civil society...

This partially because when we are dependent on a particular techno-social 
system (from childhood), when it fails, or when it is distorted by 'hidden' 
actors, we have no easy way to reset our relations in that system. (Example -- 
imaging in this finite world that electricity becomes hard to get, all the 
protocols of communication and so on becomes redundant for all of us...)

Just some morning musings...

Cheers,
JOhn

-- 
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Dr. John Hopkins, BSc, MFA, PhD
grounded on a granite batholith
twitter: @neoscenes
http://tech-no-mad.net/blog/
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++