Some days ago I started reading Sherry Turkle’s last book: “Alone Together, why we expect more of technology and less from each other”.
I am still midway through it (actually, a third of it) but I cannot get rid of one the very first anecdotes in the first chapter that Turkle used to paint the uncanny feeling she had about the notion of “live enough”. This is just one of the components of what she calls “the robotic moment”, i.e., that turning point in society when we stop being conscious about the difference between the reality of (at least, today’s) robots and the impulse to project on them humanlike traits. In a way, the “robotic moment” can be defined as that cultural moment when our relationship to robots becomes more “human” than the ones we sustain with other fellow humans. The whole book seems to be about the societal consequences of such a shift. I won’t be able to confirm if this is the case until I reach the final chapter, however. In the meantime, I am having a feast. Turkle’s books are always interesting.
But let’s go to back the anecdote that caught my attention. Picture this: an exhibition about Darwin and his theory of evolution at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. The curators have strived to get as many “real things” about Darwin as possible: original notebooks, Darwin’s magnifying glass, etc. They also brought several live Galápago’s turtles as part of the exhibition. The reaction of kids to the presence of these turtles was what called the anthropologist in Turkle into action. In her own account:
It was Thanksgiving weekend. The line was long, the crowd frozen in place;I began to talk with some of the other parents and children. My question -“Do you care that the turtle is alive?”- was a welcome diversion from the boredom of the wait. A ten-year-old girl told me that she would prefer a robot turtle because aliveness comes with aesthetic inconvenience: “Its water looks dirty. Gross”. More usually, votes for the robots echoed my daughter’s sentiment that in this setting, aliveness didn’t seem worth the trouble. A twelve-year-old girl was adamant: “For what the turtles do, you didn’t have to have the live ones.” Her father looked at her, mystified: “But the point is that they are real. That’s the whole point’
Ever since I read this fragment I have been going back to it again and again. “Is this such a problem? Is this a good example?”, I find myself asking. Did the kids really prefer the robotic turtles because they would be “more real” than the living ones? Or the children were willing to renounce to the “real thing” (living turtles) so that the “real thing” could be left unbothered in their original habitat instead of suffering a long journey to NYC (or just from the Bronx Zoo)? Did the kids show greater concern for the “real” turtles and than the designers of the exhibition and the adults visiting it, mad about associating authenticity with “real things”? Did the children show a better understanding about the mechanics behind the narrative of an exhibition? Did they assume that an exhibition could very well be based on mock-ups and still be a strong narrative? Were the kids more postmodern (as narratives go) than their parents? Did they hold true that authenticity and reality may not be synonymous?. Am I projecting too much of myself on the kids behaviour?. ;-)
I am still puzzled about this example. What I have read in the rest of the book (which I find highly interesting) is not helping me getting myself out of this puzzle.
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