Interpreting GIST & Ada/ Questioning our Survival

So this week I'm supposed to post information about the historical or contemporary difference(s) technology makes. Well…. This week’s discussion of Conceiving Ada was interesting. I was pleasantly surprised that the class picked up on different aspects of the movie. Our minds are trained to think in such various ways that I do not why I’m surprised when people don’t think like me and vice versa. It’s funny how some of us had expectations based on what we wanted to see versus being open to interpreting the movie entirely, whether based on our training our academic expertise or not. While watching Ada I was mainly watching for a narrative, for some sort of moral of the story and then I would connect the moral to the course topic. But this is the type of movie that could be watched a million times. We could pick something new out from it and/ or interpret it differently each time.

Although we live in more liberal era concerning gender and sexuality, it was interesting on how the class thought about Ada’s sexual activity. While some of us believed she was exchanging sex for knowledge, some of us also believed she was using it as an exchange of power and liberation. I thought this was interesting because all of the men who tutored her were so willing to accept her regardless of forcing her alone to take responsibilities for their sexual behavior.

It was also interesting to see how this movie tested our interpretation of how knowledge is acquired; the importance of physical notes vs. aural and/or computer based. Not only did we as an audience interpret how information was decoded, but so did the Ada. When Ada found her hand written notes had been rewritten by her husband, she was furious. In our current era we can type our notes and so if someone alters them in any manner we can still access a fresh unaltered digital copy whereas Ada could only rely on what she had.

Random thought, but just the other day I was thinking about how special our world is in terms of our genius technological inventions. For example the use of texting, something people are increasingly getting addicted to, are we starting to take our technology for granted?

 Imagine if one day, all of our physical/ electronic technology stopped working. Would we survive? Do we still remember the primitive basics of survival?