1) Rheingold’s 5 digital literacies are as follows: Attention, Participation, Collaboration, Network Awareness and Critical Consumption. Something that I notice a lot in my usage of digital technologies has to do with my attention. Often times, I need to be doing something with my hands, otherwise I will get very bored. This happens a lot when I am watching something on Netflix, so to combat that, I will often grab my DS and start playing that. But then my attention all gets focused onto that so I lose focus on what I’m watching and often don’t pick up anything that happened in the show, because my attention was elsewhere. It’s the same thing with participation. I have to be participating in something in order to be engaged and attentive, otherwise my curiosity will get the better of me and my brain will begin to wander, thus making me lose valuable focus. It is something that I know happens to me and I know it’s something that I also need to work on, but it’s so hard to focus working on how to focus better. It’s probably my biggest flaw, but the fact that I can recognize it as my flaw is a good thing, right?
2) One still that I used in my movie was that of a mosaic tile pig which appeared to be on the wall of the New York City subway. The pig has a black outline around it, which helps the light pink color of the pig contrast with the white tile of the subway walls. It also has various splotches of various colors aside from pink, which helps to break up the mundane color of the pig and adds interest to what you’re looking at. If you look closely, the pigment of the pig gets darker as you go from its back to its belly. It’s the same thing with the legs. The lighter tile is used on the back legs to signify depth and so you can see that it is further back in the picture than the front legs. It also has white wings, which is probably why the artist chose to do the black outline, because without it the wings would be nigh invisible in contrast to the white background of the subway.
3) There is a soundtrack in the background, laid over the sounds that were already in the movie clips that I downloaded. The song in the background starts off low, but gradually gets louder. It does not, however, completely drown out the sounds of the movie clips. They are in fact subtle, but noticeable. You can hear birds chirping and water running, and the reason why they are still audible over the music is because the music has a pattern to it, whereas the chirping and water are just various noises and are easily distinguishable from the music.
4) I think that Mirium probably doesn’t think the robot is truly alive, but acts like it is. In the same way that Anne, the graduate student, would trade her boyfriend for a robot and pretend like it’s a human if it were to give her something that the boyfriend couldn’t, Mirium pretends that Paro is alive because it is much more comforting that if she were to pretend it was just a robot with fur. There is something rather tranquil about pretend and that is that it’s all in your imagination. The robot doesn’t actually feel the warmth and calming reassurance of your hand, it’s you perceiving that it does experience those things and purely that. Your imagination is allowing you to give life to something that, in an ordinary sense, doesn’t actually have any life. It’s rather interesting to think about because in the same way that children play with inanimate objects and give those toys names and personalities, adults can do the same with a robot. They can let their imagination guide them into believing that this robot might actually be perceiving human emotion, on some level, and that it might provide some sort of companionship in times of loneliness which can be a very comforting thought to some. So to put it simply, No. Mirium does not think that Paro is alive, but she imagines him to be so on a level because playing pretend is a lot more comfortable than playing the truth.
