Telepresence: Body Unplugged (Levinson, Nunes, Rushkoff)

Telepresence: Body Unplugged (Media Ecology Association at GVSU in 2013)
Hangout Panelists:
Paul Levinson: http://www.sff.net/people/paullevinson/
Mark Nunes: http://educate.spsu.edu/mnunes/
Douglas Rushkoff: http://www.rushkoff.com/

...actually even came up with a term for this

...anthropotropic - anthropo from the same root as anthropology, human;

and tropic - moving towards a human dimension. and

this is the same kind of thing when you use the word tropic for heliotropic plants

that grow towards the sun. We evolve our media to grow towards us,

meaning like us in the way that we communicate. So once upon a time,

what we're talking about today could have been written in an article and printed up and

distributed and the three speakers, each of us would write out our thoughts

and we could still do that today; but beginning about a

100 years ago or even a little more recently people could

also have the option of doing that through telephones,

and radio; what we would say called audio conference.

That had a great advantage in comparison to writing something up and distributing it,

because certainly up until the digital age anything that was written down would take time,

and there would be therefore some delay between the time

that the writer would write the material and the reader could

read the material. It would be asynchronous

in the extreme. Of course the good thing about writing

is that it lasts or can last for a very long time whereas the first audio conferences