Toad, thanks to http://animal.discovery.com/amphibians/toad/
SPOILER ALERT: A lot of frustrating things happen in the latter chapters of Electric Sheep that sort of left me cold, which could have been the whole point of the author in the first place. The story did a good job at convincing me that the tiniest life form has value in this post-Word War Terminus world. Therefore it was too much to “watch” an android methodically snip (literally) the life away of any creature—even that of a spider. It didn’t fully make sense to me that Deckard should allow Rachael to go when he had the chance to kill her, and of course this led to the death of another living creature. Granted, I think Dick was trying to say that our empathy gets in the way of our reason from time to time. However, I would think that Deckard would know better than that and not be taken in by an empathy to androids, especially with his livelihood at stake.
Later Deckard didn’t even think to check the authenticity of the toad he found? Really?
And was it a such a surprise what Buster Friendly was, even though he was on TV virtually non-stop, day and night?
The whole fusion with Mercer didn’t ring true for me either, and I really don’t have an explanation as to why. I guess it’s because I don’t believe man has the ability to elevate himself on his own terms to what he believes are godly levels. The “reality” of the logic of it for me gets in the way, much like Deckard’s tryst with Rachael. How could just deciding that you can reason what is real from your own logic in any way be satisfying?
And I was further disappointed that it was never explained why the abandoned buildings had electricity and running water. Granted, not everything needs to be explained, but I bet Dick could have come up with a good reason. This made me wonder if perhaps the author didn’t think everything through.
(polls)
I may not have found the ending very satisfactory, but overall, Electric Sheep gave me a lot to think about regarding what is human, what is not human, what is considered culturally “real†and would could be a false, planted memory. The concept of planted memory is an intriguing one, as a core desire of humanity is to be able to operate on the assumption that what one believes is true, actually is.
Of course, memory feeds nicely into the idea of persistence, discussed in the readings from Lingua Fracta this week. I will say that the chapter of persistence I found easier to follow than that of perspective because what Brook chose to use in his overview of style and metaphor didn’t flow quite as naturally into his ideas of interface and perspective. Ironically, my background is in Communications and not English Rhetoric and yet that didn’t seem to help. I liked the discussion and examples of interface, but I got lost somewhere in Brook’s discussion on metaphor. Not sure what went wrong, but his discussions of Nietsche and Derrida just seemed to take a very circuitous road for me that weren’t very easily getting me back to style and interface. Sentences like this one meant nothing to me: “Restoring some of the embossing on Aristotle’s use of the word metaphor reveals some interesting connections–connections suggested both in the transmedial development of perspective [?] and in more recent attempts to gather media under the umbrella of polymorphic [?] or mulitliteracies” (Brook 125). He was just getting a little too esoteric and abstract for me at this point, though later in the chapter, his concrete examples were very useful.
His chapter on persistence flowed much better for me as it makes sense that we look at the Plato’s concerns about writing as it relates to memory. It makes sense to distinguish the types of memory we have—the individual and cultural (monuments/memorials). It makes sense to discuss the binary of absence/presence. I think I may be a little fuzzy on the difference between chronos and kairos though. Chronos seems to be that structured, measured and predictable quality of time; kairos is a moment in that time that is perceived as sudden, unexpected and perhaps even uncontrollable.
Brook’s focus is to bring all these ideas back to the canon of memory, so in a way I wasn’t surprised that he didn’t go into how humans are adapting to the glut of information on the Internet beyond how he himself avails himself of aggregators and tagclouds to seek out new information.
In a book I recently read, Curation Nation, author Steven Rosenbaum basically says that with all the glut of information that is out there, with more content being created my multitudes of people each day, technology will have to once again give way to human beings to act as the aggregators and curators of information. Rosenbaum believes that algorithms can only go so far, but humans (bloggers, and the like) will ultimately be combing through the vast array of information and individual users will look to them for useful or trustworthy information. Granted, RSS and Google Reader still have their place too.
I must admit that I am not a fast reader, certainly not with this dense academic writing. So I found it ironic that Brook mentions a quote from David Shenk (actually citing Bjork), “the more things we have to remember or learn, ‘the lower the probability that you’ll remember any of them’†(Brook 153). There is a ton of material in this book that is getting harder to cram into my head as we proceed. Plus, I find Brook spends a lot of time on stating what he’s trying to do, but then instead of that making more sense to me, he skirts over how he’s relating the theorists he chooses with his “p†terms. I should have smelled a rat when he kept citing Derrida. 🙂
Again, the “a coda†chapter went back to his goals and hopes for “this book,†and whereas, I do believe it has reacquainted people with concepts of classical rhetoric and their adjustment and reapplication to new technologies, the main critique for me was that Brook should have spent less time brushing by major theorists and more time explaining the progression of his viewpoints more directly. Perhaps his readers should have known the basics already, and if I were approaching this degree from an English Studies background and not Communications, this might not have been my view. Obviously, Brook assumes whoever is reading this is very well-versed in the canons and historical rhetoric.
He may also assume we have more time to read this than we did in this course. I’m not grousing; I know we needed to jump right in so we’d have a vocabulary for the rest of the course.
Brooke, C.G. (2009). Lingua Fracta: Towards a Rhetoric of New Media. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, Inc.
Dick, P. K. (1968). Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? New York: Del Ray Trade Books.
Rosenbaum, S. (2011). Curation Nation: How to Win in a World Where Consumers are Creators. New York: McGraw-Hill.
I think your concluding thoughts about Dick and DADES get swiped away by most people when they say “Dick did drugs!” If you really got into those questions of “what is human?” read other Dick work. He goes at it from a lot of angles. I like both the short stories “We’ll Remember it for you Wholesale,” “Imposter,” and “Paycheck” (I think the short story is also the film). All three get at how memories define humanity (and we saw a little of that in DADES as well).
I agree Brooke got a little abstract at times. Sometimes I think it is very difficult to follow a theorists thinking, even if you have read the original texts s/he is referencing. And sometimes theorists like to do that slippery dance (ever read Judith Butler). In other words, I think they are trying to make meaning through the slippage. There are some days I groove with that; and other days I want it straight. Hang in there.