{"id":801,"date":"2015-03-30T21:05:15","date_gmt":"2015-03-31T01:05:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/dig210\/?p=801"},"modified":"2015-03-30T21:05:15","modified_gmt":"2015-03-31T01:05:15","slug":"disintermediated-existence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/dig210\/2015\/03\/30\/disintermediated-existence\/","title":{"rendered":"Disintermediated Existence"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"android-arm-human-arm-michelangelo-640x353\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Distraction becomes all too easy as we are awash in\u00a0the cornucopia\u00a0of advancements\u00a0spurred\u00a0by the digital revolution. With eyeballs fixed to headlines about the next iPhone or pictures of crushes on\u00a0FaceBook, existential questions can tacitly\u00a0seep into the shadows. It is often said that nothing can hide\u00a0in\u00a0the watchful eye of the NSA in today’s database-driven world,\u00a0but a few new things are born when the entropic force of time is abated even slightly. Death is a fundamental element of human existence, but it would seem that even the dissolution of existence into the sands of time can be partially abated.<\/p>\n

While a best friend may pass away in the real world, their FaceBook profile, emails, game avatars, and other digital paraphernalia continue to live on in cyberspace. The mourning process is also evolved. Joyce Walker notes that,<\/p>\n

Not only did the Web allow for the creation of both public and private spaces for the activities of mourning, it also allowed these spaces to exist in direct cohabitation with sites developed to meet other rhetorical goals (i.e., information sharing, news, and political discussions).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In other words, with a transformative medium of information exchange and culture creation comes a new paradigm for existence, mourning, and death. Cultural cross-politinaton takes place between political and personal spheres. These new\u00a0modes of sociocultural interface were brought to the forefront by the events of September 11, 2001. For the first time, news and images of these events were disseminated globally over a medium that not only allowed for democratized consumption but also democratized creation. Lee Manovich considers this new form of interaction as “telepresence” describing it as<\/p>\n

one example of representational technologies used to enable action, that is, to allow the viewer to manipulate reality through representations<\/i>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The key element of this new reality lies in its negotiability. People don’t have to experience these events and mourn them through one-way channels like television and radio (transformative in their own right), but they are able to\u00a0actively participate<\/em> in defining the life, death, and memory. Because this cultural exchange itself takes place over digital mediums in databases, these processes can themselves be studied and evolve understanding over time.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Distraction becomes all too easy as we are awash in\u00a0the cornucopia\u00a0of advancements\u00a0spurred\u00a0by the digital revolution. With eyeballs fixed to headlines about the next iPhone or pictures of crushes on\u00a0FaceBook, existential questions can tacitly\u00a0seep into the shadows. It is often said that nothing can hide\u00a0in\u00a0the watchful eye of the NSA in today’s database-driven world,\u00a0but a few … Continue reading Disintermediated Existence<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-801","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-group-1","category-readers"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/dig210\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/801","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/dig210\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/dig210\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/dig210\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/14"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/dig210\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=801"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/dig210\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/801\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":808,"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/dig210\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/801\/revisions\/808"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/dig210\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=801"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/dig210\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=801"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/dig210\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=801"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}