Discussion and World Building (Afternoon 1/14)

After lunch, we had a fascinating discussion about the social dilemma (10/10 would recommend). The social dilemma was a documentary about the recurring issues within social media platforms and “free” search engine platforms (stuff like Google). I’m not going to get into the details of this documentary too much, just because watching the actual documentary will explain it better. But basically, the creators and managers of various social platforms (Twitter, Facebook, Google, Instagram, and basically every platform) got together and confessed about marketing strategies and the ideology behind creating the “like” button and refreshing the page is essentially a slot machine.

Our discussion was not only clarifying the ideas within the documentary but maki
ng connections to all the other topics/philosophy theories/ movies we had encountered in these past nine days. I found myself connecting this documentary to the Good Place and Baudrillard’s theories. I think the social dilemma brought up a lot of interesting ideas and connections but I found that there was no real solution. Our conversation continued to talk about possible solutions and we even talked about the headline “Violent Video Games Cause Violence”, we found that not only was the statement untrue but that violent video actually desensitized individuals. 

After our seminar, we got some time to continue working on our creative response in Minecraft, based on some of the theories and lessons that we have learned in the last two weeks. During this time I worked on my shared creative response with Cricket,  “A Cyborg Manifesto” by feminist Donna Haraway and we also made a response to the Shopping Cart Theory. Both of these texts really stood out to us, and I feel like we both felt that the lack of an ecosystem within our Minecraft realm was kind of depressing so we wanted to recreate an idea like Haraway's instead of a human body we chose to make a tree into a house thus creating the natural to a more of a cyborg.


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