cgl2012-blog

[cgl2012-blog]

1 My Question: In the first chapter KK reflects his uncertainty about the nature of technology and his own conflicted relationship to it, leading to an illuminated new world view, a newly coined word „the technium“ (to designate the greater, global, massively interconnected system of technology vibrating around us) and a proper task: to understand technology´s behaviour in order to decide how to respond. 

[cgl2012-blog]

WhatTechWants #1

kelly introduces the technium, a non-human autonomous superorganism whose flow of information is vast, crafted from nature and full of life, encompassing art, culture, artifacts and all the evolved knowledge from the very beginning of mankind to the clever inventions that helped our ancestors survive.

[cgl2012-blog]

Achim_Kelly3

Claiming that technium isn`t a human invention but a force born from life itself, a extension of the human mind with technology being the body for our ideas, Kelly tries to proof his definition of technium as a type of evolutionary life set apart from the organic evolution by 

A) being a recursive network of pathways with jumps back instead of a system of repeating, forking branches

B) developing through jumps and abrupt changes instead of incremental transformation

C) never extinct and disappear, living forever

and with these characteristics technology is becoming the seventh kingdom of life on earth.

[cgl2012-blog]

Achim_Kelly2

Analysing the historical development of technology from the very beginning, Kelly described how tools, especially the tool language, enabled the rapid expansion and adaptation of us human beings, finally coming to the conclusion that only through technology mankind is able to transcend the constrains of nature and unleash his mind - paying the price that technology has domesticated us and we are symbiotic with it now.

[cgl2012-blog]

Achim_Kelly1

Recocnizing the contradiction between new and more technology every day and the personal necessity of less, Kelly tries to define what technology is before finding out about what technology wants - inventing the term Technium (similar to the german word "Technik") a powerful force like nature, a maturing and living system, arise organism-like in feedback loops from our system of tools, machines an ideas to become at least autonomous and self-reproducing.

[cgl2012-blog]

Kelly explains why for him technology is the seventh kingdom of life: technology never dies - even the oldest tools are newly manufactured for tourists or the markets or restored/recreated by hobbyists. Technology is memorized by culture and thus can not go extinct (only be rare) as biological species.

[cgl2012-blog]

Inventions of early sapiens made it possible to spread to niches far beyond the range possible with genetic evolution; then the evolvement of the brain started and thus - over the chiliads - made us more dependent of technology. Kelly concludes in technology becoming a verb and a force - not a thing anymore.

[cgl2012-blog]

In the 1st chapter of „What Technology Wants“ Kelly asks himself of the essence of technology - by the way he himself can not be considered as a tech geek - and invents the term TECHNICUM to describe the whole system of certain technologies. Moreover he stats, that autonomy of technology is often self-evident. 

[cgl2012-blog]

In the first chapter of "What technology wants" Kevin Kelly describes his ambigous relationship towards technology which is determined through the fascination and the concern about the role of technology in people's life.

[cgl2012-blog]

Unit Operations/Introduction: In the introduction Bogost describes the four parts of the book as well as his approach to bring together critical theory, informatics and videogames, as they are all highly specialized fields; to make a future of tangible collaboration (between the fields) possible.

[cgl2012-blog]

Persuaive Games/Purposes of Persuasion: Bogost demands a recognization of the persuasive and expressive power of procedurality, as its processes do influence us and seed changes in our attitudes, who can result in cultural change over time and therewith change our world.

[cgl2012-blog]

Persuaive Games/Exercise: Bogost works himself through the history of exergames, starting from DDR to Yourself! Fitness, concluding that families, who are encouraged by "the American Dream", are caught in a downward spiral between more work and less movement.

[cgl2012-blog]

Persuasive Games/Values and Aspirations: Bogost points out, that for him there is a great difference between being schooled and educated, whereas educated means to become an expert of human improvement, how to think independently and how to express oneself.

[cgl2012-blog]

Persuasive Games/Procedural Literacy: In Procedural Literacy Bogost explains, that video games teach biased perspectives through procedural rhetorics, which can be read through direct engagement.

[cgl2012-blog]

Unit Operations/Humanism and Object Technology

Bogost derives an analogy between humanism and object technology through a comparison of the technological concepts of abstraction, encapsulation, polymorphism, and inheritance on the one side and the concepts of Lacan, Kittler, McLuhan, Postman, Derrida, the The Human Genome Project and Dawkins' idea of the meme on the other side.

[cgl2012-blog]

Unit Operations/Structuralism and Computation

Bogost derives the connection between computation and (post)structuralism from former theoretical concepts such as realism and nominalism.

[cgl2012-blog]

Unit Operations/Unit Operations

"[T]he concept of unit operations [is] a general conceptual frame for discrete, compressed elements of fungible meaning." Units replace the concept of systems and are used to describe other cultural phenomenoms as well as computer games.