Ex Machina Film Report #5

Ex Machina was grounded on the principle Man vs Machine. This movie is astounding. Ava who was created as Artificial Intelligence by Ethan was a "created machine with consciousness" . Ava was able to have impersonations of a real life human being in which she expressed feeling, emotion, and affection through dancing. Ava's appearance was humanlike and she experienced humanlike feelings and emotions. What truly touched me was despite her creation and formation of how she came to be, her development was just like human persons. Its compelling to even think about artificial persons walking among us today indistinctively.

I find it very compelling to consider questions such as: Do Machines have feelings? Can they ever be equal or should they be treated as equals, with the same morals and ethics we treat human-like peoples? What constitutes a human being? With the real life advances in technology within artificial intelligence people find it difficult to analyze and distinguish the difference between humanism and non humanism. The idea that something we create, that some see as nothing more than what a cellular device or even a lamp would be, and elevate it past that to 'true life' makes many uncomfortable and on edge.   In my opinion, despite its creation and originator, if t has the ability to function like and consciously and ethically be engaged in society. Then, that is what constitutes a human.

21st Century Rhetoric for Radicals

The Rhetoric of Contemporary Activism involves social movements, political cultures, and even small groups of activists exhibit rhetorical commonalities. The ten Contemporary Activisms include: anti-authoritarian, diversity, multi-historical, idealistic and prefigurative, anti-representational, visionary, symbolically powerful, and self righteous and self critical. The rhetorical gap means to make adjustments. That way, the audience can quickly glean and understand the information in addition to taking responsibility and reflecting on continuous observations. The network of rhetoric is basically a wheel of influence that warrants extended discussions. This includes public movements or networking through publications and social networking sites. A new form of activism includes expressing your desires and successfully activating them through social networking sites. A personal example could be thinking of a business that could be beneficial to self and others within the community. Then, creating a website and publications to further explain the mission and promote the business.

Five examples of Neo Radicalism involves creating a proposal. The conditions however are anti-authoritarian activism, activists communication, communication and reality, western philosophy, and visionary. I personally adapt to visionary for references of having a vision and being motivated to create it.

Cultivating Styles

The four types of body rhetoric are embodied argumentation, street theatre, rhetorical style, and the vibe as bodily emanation. All of these components amplify the way we communicate and embrace one another face to face through interpersonal communication. Although each body of rhetoric has its own function, rhetorical style, in its unique way  describes the overall look and feel of communicative gestures. There are three types of body argumentation which include body, your message, and your audience. For instance, speakers use their bodies to further communicate their messages while adapting to the wants, needs, and expectations of the audience. Because we are all different and express ourselves either culturally or based on sexual orientation, we all have different ways of cultivating styles of body language. Five steps to cultivating style are observation, reflection, application, chance, and experimentation.

Individual body argument can be used to express a singular emotion while collective can be used to express many emotions non verbally. 

GROUP MEMBER

1) What is your definition of language, and do you think it connects with the media, to grow an influence?

2) Their are five guidelines to language and communication. What are those 5 guidelines and does our generation follows these guidelines? How and why?

3) "War is peace; Freedom is slavery; ignorance is strength" a quote from the book 1984, What is this quote telling the people in this novel? In what way is language on social media influencing us like the language did in Orwell's 1984?

4) How is the media and the world influenced through propaganda? 

Bicentennial Man Film Report

Watching Bicentennial Man gave me a new perspective on our constitutional rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It opens up a gateway to the warmth and happiness that nature affords us as we progress from being in infancy and developing our thoughts, motions, and feelings as they transfer into adulthood despite the origination of our existence.

The film has a very personal connotation. A very touching story of how the artificial intelligence "creation "loves all people and devotes his created life to serving others. He feels pain for losing those closest to him even though he's not enabled to die. One line that truly resonated with me was when Andrew expressed something that was dearest to his heart. He showed the emotions he felt for others and vice versa by saying, "it is torture that you can cry and I can't." Viewing tears as a privilege feels way beyond my reach. It is almost as though, not being able to bear those emotions are unreachable. I feel as though, despite something being created by man, if it has the ability to act and develop humanlike feelings and thoughts than the gift of humanity shall be granted to them despite the origination of their initial purpose and creation.

Social Media and Personal Expression

Technology today, especially through the platform of social media, creates separation between the way we express ourselves through writing, public speaking, and very personal intimate conversations with other people. For example, social media speech differs from that of a professional conversation with an employer or professor. Students and professional staff rely so heavily on social media platforms to express their inner thoughts and emotion using fragmented sentences. This form of language conveys unprofessionalism as a different form of socialization in media. This creates a bridge in the way people communicate and express themselves daily in the absence of social media. Four rhetorical approaches in media today include storytelling, writing, public speaking, and building history knowledge. These radical approaches enable to speak confidently. These forms of public speaking also involves immediacy. The uncompromising of body language, eye contact, voice inflections, and silences all help to create meaningful moments using person to person relationships. This collective experience creates a person to person experience rather than a virtual connection through social media. A challenging situation that forced me to analyze and respond to diverse communities and audiences include volunteering at the Ronald Mac Donald House. Exasperating count less hours with a non profit organization has enabled me to engage and interact with people of different cultures and different backgrounds. Being able to exercise patience and interact with people who are ethnically different than I am has allowed me to embrace different cultures and diverse communities. Without knowing how to communicate outside of social media, it is possible to develop speech anxiety when speaking in front of large crowds and engage in professional settings. That is why it is very important to exercise public speaking and conversation engagement outside of social media platforms including involvements with different organization to suffice for gain of experience with people of different ethnic and cultural backgrounds.

Social Norms : Rhetoric for Radicals

According to the Rhetoric for Radicals social norms are patterns of interaction geared towards adapting people to a life of a certain patterns and routines through pattern manipulation. For example, according to society, it is the women's duty to bear children and care for the home in addition to pursuing personal endeavors. This has been constituted as a social norm that restricts women's life choices. In like manner, it makes it possible to say that technology today might help us build a new inclusive social norm due to the fact that it changes and enhances our personal world of communicating by changing our of human communication using technology and social media. People use different forms of media daily to convey  their innermost feelings and daily dwellings which makes it easy to say that social norms have been determined as socially construed rather than inherently given. Therefore, it has become vital that people work towards the norms proven to be socially just and empowering rather than that of a detriment.

Despite how easy of a notion this might sound, media tends to ignore or falsify different movements of action due to given rises of anti-authoritarian activism which can cause distort and divide society to go against governmental or civilian powers. If the media or government feels as though they are creating a sense of rebellion and anti society behaviors than it makes it easy to falsify information to secure themselves. In rhetoric for radicals there are five contemporary challenges faced daily. The five contemporary challenges current activists face are intercultural exchanges, intercultural communications, culture specific rhetoric’s, translation issues and creating transnational rhetoric’s. These five challenges allows us to address and confront issues of diversity and inclusion in the sense that racial biases and slurs aren't a negotiating factor and neither is the ability to adapt to people of different ethnic backgrounds. Technololgy will definitely bridge these gaps between cultures and people because provides a intercultural sensitivity within social norms.