Live-tweeting this second half of the semester was a very different experience in comparison to the first half. This time around, I felt a little more confident and understood more of what was expected. I even found a little routine that allowed me to generate tweets prior to our viewing of the weekly film and still engage with my peers.
Looking back on each week I began to realise the connection between the weekly lecture topic and the film we watched if I hadn’t seen the lecture prior to the film I didn’t pick up the connection which was something I experienced in the earlier half of our viewings.
The task of tweeting and engaging with these films whilst also making connections to the lecture material was a challenge. I found myself wanting to watch the films and soak up what was being communicated without forgetting to tweet and interact with my peers and the connections they were making and often found that I would read movie reviews and analyses the night before to prepare tweets and tweet them at the perfect moments.
Looking back on each week, I found there were moments that truly stood out to me.
Robot and Frank (2012) Week 6
This week was centred on artificial intelligence, Robot and Frank truly showed us a future that is not only possible but also positive. Aside from the stealing, the fundamental value that our future will rely on artificial intelligence in the form of a robot similar to Robot is not only a future we should look forward to but one with many benefits for all ages not just for our elderly. It shows us that our futures may not actually be as different or as dystopian as other films depict our futures to look like and for this I found this film to be one that made me look forward to our future. Artificial intelligence doesn’t have to be negative or completely change our lives for the worse, it’s there to prevent human error, being available 24/7 or for the simple fact that for those tasks that humans may not be able to complete AI is there to assist (Kumar 2019).
Arrival 2016 (Week 8)
Arrival was a film with a slow start. It was highly emotional and focused on that highly interesting question, are aliens real? Futurists use their curiosity to gain knowledge about what’s to come. They anticipate future scenarios and Dr Louise Banks did just that. She used her knowledge and communicative skills and was able to communicate with the Aliens and was given the opportunity to see her own future. The future she was seeing was one she decided to continue rather than alter her destined future. This film showed us the probable, the possible and the preferable.
Alita Battle Angel 2019 (Week 9)
Alita Battle Angel made me think about the people we already have in our society. If a cyborg is defined as having both human organic elements and biochemical components, this would mean any person with an artificial limb fits within the definition of a cyborg. With this in mind, people with artificial limbs do not yet possess the physical abilities that Alita had. This area of technology has so much yet to continue to develop making it a very important and interesting area to watch out for, we may one day just have our very own version of Alita.
Ready Player One 2018 Week 10
Ready Player One invites the thoughts of virtual reality and cyberspace to us in a way that makes us realise this is our future. Our cyberspace worlds already exist, they may not exist in the exact same way as The Oasis, but we already have The Metaverse from Facebook and of course the virtual reality games. We can even look at our social media platforms as cyberspace, where we can reinvent ourselves if we wish, and only show who and what we want to one another.
This round of live-tweeting was more insightful and enjoyable. The films felt to me to be more realistic accounts of where our future could evolve towards. The advancements we have had in technology make the potential of the futures found in these films feel more achievable. These advancements seem more probable to occur because they have better CGI and special effects that make the events in the films appear more believable and thus also making them more enjoyable to consume.
The lecture content correlated perfectly with each of our films and made me begin to imagine the possibilities that could become our future. Cyberspace and artificial intelligence feel more inevitable than the arrival of aliens and changing our destined future or the emergence of cyborgs like Alita, but we never know when a new life form may enter earth or become lab-grown/sewn. This is where we truly need futurists to plan and think through ways to live through such events. This task has made me question all aspects of life and for that I’m grateful.
References
Kumar 2019, Advantages and Disadvantages of Artificial Intelligence, Medium, Towards Data Science, viewed 16 May 2022, <https://towardsdatascience.com/advantages-and-disadvantages-of-artificial-intelligence-182a5ef6588c>.
Olivia Lopez 
Reblogged this on Future Cultures.
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