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/

I actually even came up with a term for this: anthropotropic.

"Anthropo" from the same root as anthropology and 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 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, printed up and distributed.

And the free speakers, each of us would write out our thoughts, and we could still do that today.

But, beginning about a hundred years ago, or even a little more recently,

people could also have the option of doing that through telephone and radio, what we would say quality audio conference.

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

because certainly 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 wrote the material and the reader could read the material.

It would 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 were not usually recorded, so they disappeared the instant the conference was over.

In addition to that, however, the audio presentation lacked a very crucial dimension.

A dimension which is being made up for and contributed in this very conference that we are all having right now,

and that of course would be the visual dimension.

So it's not a coincidence that we went from writing to speaking, in terms of this kind of academic situation,

to mow not only speaking and hearing, but seeing each other.

It's not a coincidence because guess what, we have eyes as well as ears.

When we communicate, we usually do see each other in the real world, and it's the real world which serves as

the impetus for all media evolution, which really consists of two prongs.

One, attempts to extend our communication beyond our immediate physical surroundings,

where we do have full audio-visual, multi-sensory stimuli and inputs and outputs.

But the other prong of that evolution tries to make up for what's lost as media evolved.

So we pay a price for our earlier extensions.

You can't see the person or hear the person when you're reading something.

But over the millennia, and especially increasingly in recent years and accelerating,

we are retrieving many of the lost elements of face-to-face communication. So that's point one.

Point two, jumping from the late 1970s when I wrote Human Replay to the 1980s,

mid-late 1980s when my wife and I founded Connected Education,

back then in the mid-1980s, we began offering courses online,

in cooperation with the New School for Social Research, and others places,

and we had students from over 35 countries around the world and just about all 50 states in the United States,

earning credits towards their Master's degree, and in fact getting an MA in media studies from New School.

And all of that was done digitally, but it was done purely through text.

Back in the mid-1980s, we had every once in a while an image, cropped up, that popped up here in there,

but there were no voices, there were no moving and live conferences such as we're now having.

That was extremely successful.

But again, it was clear to me that although we could, and would in fact continue that kind of text-based education,

that we would also soon be having an audio-visual kind of education, which what where're now doing another example of.

I could talk a lot more about that, but let me just move on to my third point.

And I'm sure our other speakers have interesting things to say.

The third point has to do with something that happened, well, in just the past 24 or so hours:

the death of James Gandolfini, and the world-wide outpouring of grief that has happened as a result of that.

And it reminded me of a principle of media and media effects that my friend Josh Schmieritz came up with when John Lennon died in 1980.

Josh discussed something he called "Mediated Grief."

What he was getting at is:

why do we feel such grief when people that we don't personally know from Adam die, or something bad happens to them?

You know it happens over and over again.

It happens with political leaders, it happens with great musical artists, it happens with movie stars.

I felt bad when Larry Hagman died about six seven months ago -J.R. Ewin is the character he played on Dallas.

And the reason, clearly, is when we see and hear a person who, going back to the adjourns of television,

comes into our homes, on our screens,

and now not only comes into our homes by old-fashion television screens,

but by these kinds of screens that we are now using, that we have on our laptops, iPads, and smart phones,

we feel that we know that person.

And therefore when that person dies, we grieve almost as much,

and in some cases even more than we would if someone that we knew in person died.

So what this then shows is how we surround anything that has to do with telepresence with the full compliment of our human emotions.

So I hope you feel some positive human emotions about what we're talking about today,

and with that I'll let my colleagues talk. Thank you.

OK, I guess I'm next up.

Mark Nunes, here.

So back in 1992 Michael Benedikt published a collection of essays entitled "Cyberspace: First Steps."

It was right around the time that I started to write on the rise of the popularity of the internet.

And that book was my first exposure to academic discussions of telepresence and virtual reality.

That book, which included essays on erotic anthologies and liquid architectures marked, for me at least,

the start of the cyberspace decade, which would come to a close in the dot com bubble burst of 2000.

It was a heady time for speculative media theory,

with lots of hyperbolic assertions as to what the simulacrum world of virtual reality had to offer.

And the hyperbole abounded in all directions, with euphoric and dystopian visions

of a society and a culture radically transformed by digital networks.

A common theme in many of these dreams and nightmares of telepresence was

a conceit that digital networks could create a space in between, neither here or there,