The Mooc has finally started!
Adrenalin has somehow diminished as we have been sharing our fears and anxieties with the whole group. People have really been very supportive and we have exchanged a lot of interesting ideas and experience.
Time to dedicate to the course, blog, prepare this week’s chat and work full time. Not much. Even so, I managed to watch the four movies and have a quick look at the first reading. As I come to think more about these issues and despite not being pessimistic I have the feeling that the view conveyed in most of them is really dystopic. Society depicted in Terminator, Blade Runner,I, Robot, A.I. and others is Technology dependant and controlled. There’s always an aura of chaos, negativity and somehow unhappy endings. Bendito Machine is such an example. Technology addiction and dependance with a sort of chaotic ending. Thursday draws the picture of a tech obssessed society as opposed to nature surviving in between. I found New Media quite a disturbing scenario of what future life may/ could be. Again disturbing.
Finally, I really enjoyed Inbox. It is real, tender and even romantic! It also shows our dependance on machines but on the other hand it offers a quite utopian view on what ‘they’ can do for us.
I have just been showing the students a film that could easily be included in this list. A.I. by Steven Spielberg. It elicits moral and ethical issues other than just providing us with a dystopian or utopian perspective.
Englishing around 
Hi Cristina!
Finally we have started 🙂
Well, personally I’ve loved this short films, the dystopian world that they reflex is almost as good as the Hollywood films we use to draw on when we think about dystopia (New Media is specially disturbing) but I disagree with you in some points.
We agree that technology can do a lot for us as we can see in Inbox (or as we are experiencing in this course) but I understood as a dystopia the fact that they still communicating by messages when their relation has become real, that shows a beginning of a non-human relations that could develop in a space as New Media one, when technology has invaded us….(it’s a magnification to be understood). I think that we have to use the technological contributions, but without giving up the traditional forms of doing things.
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Thanks for your comment Irene. These things are surely not consensual at all. But that is also why it’s worth discussing, ins’t it? 🙂
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Sorry it’s taken me until now to reply to your post, being the first off the rank in our Quadblog. Thanks for your insights into the movies and suggestions for others. I’d also like to add Paperman as a suggestion. It offers comment similar to the tender romance in Inbox, but mediates through an older technology – paper. I saw it recently with my 6 yr old as a short before ‘Wreck-it Ralph’.
Logan’s Run, a movie in the 60s and a tv series in the 70s depicts a dystopian world in which 30yrs is the limit of one’s age. Along with episodes of the Six Million Dollar Man I found these disturbing yet alluring and as a child began to imagine that everyone around me was staging my life. A little egocentric, but at 8 yrs old…….
I’ve just posted my response to week 1 material and found it hard to stick to one train of thought, so well done on the movie commentary front. Looking forward to next week now.
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Thanks for your words, Jonathan. It’s a pity I can’t express myself in English as I certainly would in Portuguese. Sometimes I feel the text to be child-like but that’s the best I can do. I got curious about Paperman, just downloaded it to watch. Thanks for the suggestion!
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