Movement
1:
Heaven's Gates
Movement
2:
Cyborgs Can't be Educated
Movement
3:
I Don't Want to be a Computer!
Movement
4:
A Cyborg Humanist's Vision
Movement
5:
You are here!
Flash from a Cyborg Classroom: 2/3
My trekking today is across lush green lawns to enter university classrooms. Amidst clean white walls, for an hour, joined by "Sesame Street"-trained cyborgs, we attend to the serious business of trying to understanding ourselves and our world. It is a complicated flashing world of information and machines, of software and hardware and wetware. I am enthralled by my colleagues, by their energy and excitement. Under their tutelage, we flash through so much so quickly. It is exhilarating, vitalizing. But sometimes I feel disappointment, though I usually hide it even from myself. I feel a longing, like a body-memory of the Himalaya, for a sustained engagement, for the long journey on a single path.
My kids were raised on "Sesame Street" and "Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood." Fred was sincere and kind, but the Muppets are loved. "Sesame Street" produced by Children’s Television Workshop, takes advantage of the flash potential of television. Each program is a complex collage of small segments cut and pasted together. The puppets are invariably more endearing, cuter, and more real than the humans on the program. The program is certainly a forerunner to "The Simpsons" in showing that serious and sensitive human issues are addressed most effectively by non-humans. However, this is nothing new as evident in the antiquity of shadow-puppet theatres such as wayang kulit. Fred Rogers took great care to distinguish between reality and fantasy, using the trolley to segue between them. Fred’s real world required serious responsibilities like feeding the fish and talking man-to-kid about feelings. His puppets were always extensions of puppeteers (animated gloves), whose voices never escaped the puppeteer’s identity. The Muppets can and did outlive their creator, Jim Henson. He could age and die while Burt and Ernie and Kermit and Miss Piggy never will. Mr. Rogers was vulnerable to aging and death, not to mention corniness. Even the long era of re-runs eventually ended.
We no longer have the choice–Fred is dead, the neighborhood gone black no doubt–and the Himalaya is but the subject of an IMAX film limited to 45 minutes so as not to exceed the audience attention span. Why go to Nepal, you might get sick or bored? Or, if you can afford it, why not hire someone to take you to the summit? Despite its hulking unfathomability, Everest has become flash.
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