Being human

Entering Week 3 of #edcmooc which is all about being human or, more exactly, discussion around what effect technological innovation and has had on our perception of humanity. Have our values as a society changed as our dependency on scientific solutions to solve our problems increases?

Habit de Marêchal by Nicolas de Larmessin – public domain via Wikimedia commons

The video resources for this week emphasise the unusual and uneasy relationship that we have with technology, on the one hand dependent on the other weary. The first video for the Toyota GT86: the ‘real deal’ the hero tries to escape a highly realistic (in cgi terms) decaying urban environment with the help of the car. Eventually he is able to smash through the outer wall of his world (Truman Show style) into our real world. It is interesting that this advert was banned by the ASA for condoning dangerous driving. The ASA said:

“While we appreciated that in the world where the ad was set, cars could drive themselves, objects could miraculously appear or disappear and certain everyday objects were contraband, we considered that the roads, public spaces and the car featured in the ad were recognisable as such and were not significantly different from those in the real world”

The imagery in this ad is telling in a number of respects.

• The computer generated world no matter how real is artificial, inauthentic and somehow unfullfilling to the computer generated hero of the ad.
• The simulated reality is gritty, dirty , dark and urban, the sort of imagery that would usually suggest authenticity – the director plays with our preconceptions
• Our world (the real world) is bright and rural
• The hero uses the car in order to break free, the symbolism suggests that technology can be a burden keeping us shackled to some humdrum existence, but also be the key to freedom.
• The director is also saying that the car is not like other cars or indeed other technology it is an extension of “the self” and it may in some ways make us more human by driving it!

The BT: Heart to Heart ad also attempts to show the human side of technology. Matthew Dearden, marketing director for BT Retail explains.

“The strand of ads we are doing at the moment are all about human interaction and human relationships [facilitated by BT products] and we thought about building the connection by getting people involved in the story of the campaign itself,”

This BT ad was also one of the first to engage the consumer in the plot. Viewers were asked to vote on what should happen to Adam and Jane next, there was also a vigorous Facebook campaign to back up this ad allowing viewers to discuss the ongoing soap of the BT family. The advert shows the family communicating using Instant messenger ” you need to talk to Mum she is acting weird” says the teenage son. When Adam and Jane finally speak it is by phone (“because it is hard to have a heart to heart when its screen to screen”) and the technology is so invisible that it is almost like they are lying next to each other in bed – the seamless efficiency of their BT Homehub has conquered the problem of the geographic distance between them and is helping them close the emotional distance too. This is what Steve Kolowich refers to as the “illusion of non-mediation” which encompasses the idea that interacting in a medium that includes a human face increases trust and connectedness. Kolowich uses this as an argument for greater use of video and audio in online learning environments in order to create a more human and social space for lecturers and learners.

Kismet is a robot with rudimentary social skills!
Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.: Photograph taken by Polimerek in MIT Museum during Wikimania 2006, with permission of authorities of Museum.

The technology in the BT ad like the Toyota ad enables the main characters to to be “more human”.