Telepresence

This whole telepresence thing might have made the world become really small, easy-to-learn and very close to each others. I’ve always been thinking this type of situation very negatively. Especially in my culture, now it is really easy to hurt people without using any weapons. Government even makes some kind of poster warning people “Your words might kill someone”. And even most websites including the biggest portal/blog website in Korea made people have to give their real name when they want to comment on something and even though there are comments they hide those comments so that people have to click on button to view those comments. The funny thing is there used to be lots of comments but not any more. It happens after some celebrities committed suicides because of the depression which their families claim that their children have had it because of those Evil comments on the internet about them. Well..maybe that could be the case and it’s not just the case of the celebrities.

Personally, I don’t believe telepresence can create a big beige global culture. I would say GIANT GRAY culture. The ‘globalization’ means to me is that people know about other culture and accept them as they are, not try to change them and judge them. The great case of letting the world know about their society is the one(Flash mobs) that Clay Shirky mentioned. These are the something that people can do and the government can’t. But once people started judging other culture based on the way of their living, then there won’t be the world containing the millions of unique culture. Again there will be the only big gray living environment.

What I thought as my project was the display of color of the map how similar to America is. Whenever the little country becomes very similar to the major one (maybe that would mean “similar to American culture”), the color becomes gray. It might be based on food, clothes, marriage…etc. There will be needed lots of statistics, but I think it would be very interesting to see how similar to each other we are.

jain

It’s obvious that to get rid of boundary of all over the world is really difficult, even if we can always meet physically and talk each other directly. I think our words don’t have so much power and make us confusing sometimes. There are complicated backgrounds like race, religion, pride and so on. It’s almost impossible to understand each other completely; therefore we need to know at least one matter. People need to share some feeling or incidents rather than discuss. For instance, I usually feel that I can break boundary of people whom I don’t know, when I enjoy music in festival. People put our hands together and share precious time. It helps us to understand each other as a first step.

My proposal for globalization is telehands which people hold hands together. People put hands in front of the camera and share the time for a while. This behavior looks like shake hands. Sometimes, they introduce their own national songs each other and put their hands together. There is no word between us, people pretend like body language. Otherwise, it can be like music ceremony. People hand in hand together all over the world at the same time by using camera. It’s like a huge festival at the same time all over the world. I believe that we need to walk toward each other at least one step and know a bit thing. This matter makes it possible for us to reduce conflict.

There are many idioms related to hands and a lot of them show positive relationship between people. I couldn’t mention exact idea by using hands but it might contain something. I guess it helps us to join hands with others.

Noriaki

It strikes me as odd that many of the items in my possession– from my favorite hoodie sweatshirts to my collection of little plastic dime-store toys– have traveled much farther from their point of origin than I ever have in my lifetime… My t-shirt was made in Cambodia, my plastic monster figurine was fabricated in China, as were my sneakers. These objects integrate immediately and seamlessly into my life, carrying no evidence of the locales where they were fabricated or the people who made them. In the past, when the means of transport were limited, people’s lives were filled with things made nearby, purchased nearby, most likely by and from makers and sellers known to them.

Objects that came from far away seemed strange and mysterious– I’m thinking of grade school field trips I took to the Peabody Essex Museum north of Boston, which houses a collection of goods brought via the whale-fishery to rough-hewn, Puritan-plain New England. Carved ivory boxes, ornately decorated china, tiny, delicate jade figurines… These objects asserted a striking presence in their new home. My Chinese sneakers, on the other hand, are pseudo-retro 80’s North Americana, referencing high school skate-punk culture. Does skateboard subculture flourish in China? Does this object bear any message from halfway around the world? The objects that come to us from far-flung places now are often shallow mirrors for our own culture.

In response, I propose TeleSweatShop, a live HD video-feed wall to replace the mirror in your local Old Navy, Gap, or (my favorite) Forever 21. The screen would serve as a two-way window into the factory floor or employee break room or entrance to the production facility churning out those colorful cheap t-shirts and cute sneakers, reconnecting producer with consumer, and (if only briefly) shattering our all-too-entrancing North American looking glass.

-zannah

The term Globalization has transform its definition during the last years to become a rag bag where everyone puts different explanations for the current situation of the world. The basic problem is that most of this definitions and analysis come from the developed countries. A good example of this is the book “The world is flat” of Thomas L. Friedman. I think that history is strictly bounded to the economic trends and thus there is no way of explaining the world without taking into account the economic differences among countries. The world is much less flat than we think and even if we can find the traces of some transnational corporations in several countries, the monetary differences prevent this process to get deeper in the structure of the society. The processes of exchange and interculturality are of course accelerated by the development of technology but the majority of the world population is still excluded of this global world.

In my opinion the best way to use the network in reference to globalization is to keep working on its informational aspect. Internet has evolved, and now it can be used as a multifunctional platform, to publish a blog or broadcast video and sound. We already have experienced this “journalistic” aspect of it. I would be interested in looking for ways to spread this information in an accessible way for those countries which don’t have access to the Internet. It could be a radio broadcast, letters or newspapers. It’s time to come back to traditional means using at the same time the advantages of the technology.

Rodrigo

My opinions on globalization stem from my opinions on environmental issues. I feel that things are in the state they are today because of the availability of cheap fuel. The world seems as small as it is because we can quickly and cheaply visit people on the other side of the world. Businesses have set up camp in far off places to save on cost, they’ve outsourced jobs, and they’ve redirected manufacturing all because getting things from here to there isn’t as difficult as it may have once been, before fuel has become so cheap and ubiquitous. I feel that we are all in for a change in the coming years that will drastically alter our view of the world as being “not so big after all”. I think once the world becomes bigger again forms of telepresence will most definitely fall into the spotlight simply because it’s cheaper, and innovation of this technology will grow knowing that the demand will be so high.

This isn’t exactly a complete project proposal but I definitely think it would be interesting to use this perception of the size of the world and its relation to fuel cost as a way of altering or distorting our view of things. For example, as fuel costs rise the scale or distance from New York to London will seem to increase. Our perception of a couple hours of travel will no longer seem like a simple car ride, train ride, or plane trip. Especially if its the same time that it takes to travel from New York to Philadelphia and it costs a fortune. Another project example could be a funny one. Your portraits of family members abroad could change physical scale as the distance between you and them SEEMS to get larger (as the world grows).

Somewhere near the beginning of the Iraq war, I remember thinking that all I really wanted was to have a random sampling of Iraqis stand in front of a camera and say whether they wanted us there or not. I didn’t want reporter to be holding the mike, I just wanted some place outside of media where I could hear what the average person in Iraq felt about the US “helping out.” As a starting point for this week’s topic, I’ve been thinking about some of Meng’s comments. Her observation– that more interaction can bring more conflict– is true. However, isolation and ignorance are probably much worse. Ignoring the huge questions about the economics and financial ethics of globalization, I would like to propose that in the realm of culture, the combination of globalization and telepresence may be one of the most important ways of bringing people to mutual understanding (or at least provide a platform for overcoming absolute ignorance). Nothing typifies the ability to connect people across the world like the HP Telepresence Center does. On another level though, web-cams and cell phones may be the trustworthy extensions of ourselves into unfamiliar territory: if I can’t actually visit a place and see for myself, simple devices such as web-cams can be my eyes and ears. I don’t want to see a movie or an edited reality– I think in order for me to have a feeling that I’ve just seen a slice of life from, for example Baghdad, I would need to see and hear the world from a more or less objective lens: a camera that is on 24/7, conveying it’s data directly to the internet. Low-tech or ad-hoc use of cameras in this case somehow creates a feeling of authenticity and transparency. Sousveillance. I guess the biggest impediment is always interpretation: both in a literal and figurative sense. How can I understand what I see taking place through the small view of a camera and interpret it correctly without knowing the bigger picture: the cultural context. Also, how can I understand what is being said without a computer or person translating for me?

Proposal will be posted shortly.

Kacie

So if the Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention is somewhat true, is it simply the established economic ties between countries that prevent wars? How about the shared experience of eating the same food? Listening to the same music, watching the same movies, speaking the same language, wearing the same clothes? Could a globalized culture make a more peaceful world?

Same Food Same Poison is a website for global cultural homogenization. All aspects of culture are defined with one solution through a democratic process. The best movie ever? There is only one. The most fashionable hat? Only one. A single global culture is defined and promoted through a democratic voting process to continuously define culture of the time. Visitors of the site are rewarded with McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, and other culture pushing coupons for assimilating to and identifying current cultural trends in the voting process.

how can telepresence prevent wars? network the dinner tables of perpetually (or potentially) warring nations.

real-time video feeds of families as they sit down to eat - as a cross-broadcast - say from ramallah to jerusalem and vice versa.

maybe it’s harder to launch katyusha missiles or deadly raids on your enemies after you’ve watched them carefully shovel mashed peas into the mouths of cooing babies.

What separates the current manifestations of telepresence from all those which have previously allowed for the observation of distant people and places and their potential ability to prevent violence?  An example of these alternative mediums include travel journals, biographies, documentary films, and short wave radio.  All of the previously listed modes of documentation and communication have offered the global community with the means to further develop an understanding of foreign people and environments.  These mediums were not successful in preventing violence based on cultural and nationalistic differences.  Tragically we continue to observe patterns of violence within our global population despite any advantage our current population might possess.  I do not believe modern achievements in the field of telepresence alone have the ability to prevent global conflict.

It is evident that current technological expressions in the field of telepresence have defined a new richness in regards to the way one is able to interact with foreign environments.  In my opinion, the speed at which data can be published within an online medium presents the most potential in regards to aiding in the prevention of global conflict.

During the 2003 invasion of Iraq I closely followed the blog of an young Iraqi student.  I was deeply touched as he described his wait for the return of the B-52 bombers that were en-route from an Italian re-fueling station.  He spoke of the state of his neighborhood; who had survived, who had been killed, where food was available, where water was available, and even asked his readers to suggest the best methods to save the remaining charge left on his laptop battery.  Resources such as this transcend the biased views of mainstream media and expose the inherent human qualities present in us all.  I found a sense of connection in the vulnerability broadcast by the author.  I did not question this blog, and truly believed that I was in-fact following the thoughts of a fellow human-being.

Telepresence as it has always existed depends upon the readiness of any associated users to inherently ignore the limitations of the medium while embracing any potential for human connection.

As long as there are human beings, there will be conflicts. With the globalization, the conflicts will increase because of more and more interactions between people with different backgrounds, values, and interests. To solve the problems from conflicts without using war, we are required to have a globalized mindset: open minded and could respect and appreciate and critically think about the conflicts.. How much we know about other cultures? how to be more tolerant towards difference?

Teens don’t have very strong and well-shaped background, but they are also not simply a blank piece of paper. So I’d like to create a community for teens to expose them to different cultures and make them participate in. Though teens from all over the world speak different language, drawing is the universal language. So I want to design a community for them to draw. To make it fair, each teen could only draw one continuous stroke, then waiting for teens from other countries to draw. The color representing different courtiers based on IP address will indicate whether it’s your turn.

I’m also thinking to encourage some meaningful interactions. Not just “hey, how old are you?” but a bit deeper at how they regard global issues, such as wars, environment problems, Olympic games, etc. So they are encouraged to draw on top of existing pictures or drawings of those topics.

meng

I always wondered what would happen if we dropped mesh networkable cell phones with cameras and communication infrastructure on Iraq instead of bombs.  I wonder if the transparency of enabling a nation of video bloggers would have exposed the weak threat that they in fact posed towards us, the deep internal divisions that we are dealing with now.  Most of all I wonder if it would have showed the ordinary humanity that we would be destroying with our bombs.

Bus or train are the best places to be idle, especially if that’s my daily routine. I always wonder if I could take another route. And some times, I do so. But still limited within 2 or 3 regular ways to go to school, no matter whether in Beijing, or Bloomington, or new york, same feeling.

And riders are all using different ways to get themselves out of the regular experience and teleport themselves to either newspapers, or novels or their own mobile phone or ipod. They get immerged into their own personal ambient environment.

What if I could ride the bus that gives me the experience of riding the bus in different countries? Like riding their city’s bus? e.g. listening to the sound of that route in that city based on my route, say, similar type of cities or environment.

The good thing is some of the buses are wifi enabled. So my idea is:To get on the bus, you can listen to the streaming, the sound of tokyo, or hong kong while passing the times square in new york since those are physically similar places. That’s the automatical mode.You can also select which country you want to be in.

The experience is alive and always recorded and updated by riders, when people listens to the sound on the bus, they automatically record their environment and send to the server for others to select. So you, as the rider can experience different places on the same bus route.

meng