New Civilization News: Being Real    
 Being Real2 comments
23 Sep 2002 @ 20:31, by Quidnovi

Telepistemology in the Age of the Internet

"As the virtual world grows to encompass all aspects of our lives and online interactions shape our communities, influence our politics and mediate our close relationships, the quality of being real, which is accepted and assumed with little thought in the physical world, becomes one of the central questions of society..."


"In effect, all of our knowledge about the identity of others is mediated. We cannot achieve direct knowledge of the inner state of the minds of others. Instead, we use their external appearances and actions as cues to classify them into social categories. Through empathy, these categories provide much of our presumed insight into the thoughts of others. The online world takes this mediation a step further: here, the cues themselves are perceived through the filter of the medium..."

So says Judith S. Donath, MIT Media Lab, in her most fascinating paper, BEING REAL

NB: The woman featured in the picture above is Kyoko Date, a "virtual actress" created by HoriPro, a Japanese entertainment company. Thus far, she has appeared in short videos. However, this project is not yet complete. In a few years, technology will enable Kyoko to appear on a live TV show and chat with other artists...

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2 comments

24 Sep 2002 @ 03:39 by ming : Real
That's a great article. And hey, I remember when I first spoke with an Eliza program. Seemed like an amazing artificial intelligence, even though you could guess the pattern pretty quickly.  

25 Sep 2002 @ 12:57 by quidnovi : Eliza sub-programs ;-)
What I find most intriguing though is not so much how some programs do manage to sound like a human being, but how human beings will at times sound just like one of these programs themselves---a little bit as if, at some level, we were all running our own little Eliza-like subprogram routines. (I guess to some degree that it’s the latter that helps make the former possible.)
We all do have our programmed "buttons” to which we respond when they are pressed and even at times when they are not pressed. Which does occasionally give way to some of those unexpected exchanges that Transactional Analysis refers to as a “crossed transaction” (a verbal transaction in which the transactional vectors are not parallel, or in which the ego-state addressed is not the one which responds.) A thing worthwhile keeping in mind as we read the comments of others on our Logs or as we post our own comments. Easiest said than done, though, as we do sometimes take those things with a grain of salt and other times with a grain of sulfuric ash ;-) But ultimately as the range of our perception increase, we all move beyond those few buttons as we keep adding/discovering new keys on the keyboard of our senses. In the meantime I do frequently try and remind myself of that joke about that sign at the Pavlov Institute. You know, the one that says: “Knock: Please don’t ring bell.” :-)  

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