Cait Emma Midterm Examination

Part 1:
Ian Bogost's Guru Meditation app exemplifies the ideological changes and cultural shifts that our society is undergoing.  It is a prime example of how the way we think, understand, and relate to the world is now through the lens of new media and technology.  The Guru Meditation app shows this lens as it is an activity which reinvents an "original" activity many already participate in.  Meditation, with all of it's stereotypical associations, is more or less an activity done without the assistance of technology. However, with Bogost's app the act of meditation is transformed out of it's traditional box (as we see it) and inverts it as completely dependent on technology - by the use of the iPad. This simulation, like many others is being integrated into our daily lives or at the very least must start.  
The Guru Meditation app is intriguing because it begs us to question what else should we start integrating into technology.  It asks us to experience technology in many more formats than just for the use of Facebook or Twitter.  Instead it offers our already technological society one step further into the media ether.  
Educational activities, like that of the meditation activity, is slowly but surely becoming more integrated into technology each year. Students in the education system are using search engines and online forums in order to gain information that once was found through library stacks.  They have started using this technology as a way to gain information faster and relatively much more up to date. Cathy Davidson and David Goldberg's "The Future of Learning in a Digital Age" explores the ways in which institutions have to keep up with the technological society governing them.  If children's methods of learning are changing, methods of teaching need to as well. With that said, why are the education systems hesitant to embrace such use of technology?
This is due in part to deeply rooted associations and ideologies of how certain activities should be practiced.  If Guru Meditation app breaks associations it can still be productivity practiced as "original" meditation is practiced. Therefore, technological meditation does not have to be seen as a loss of something, but a gaining of something different within the experience.  Learning must do this as well by us allowing technology the ability to create a different experience.  Marc Prensky's "Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants Part I and II" shows this problem with change through the eyes of generational gaps.  Digital Natives are already soaked in the technological ether, but the Digital Immigrants are not.  This gap between generations creates a friction within the technological experience.  The main problem with this friction is that it creates a power struggle.  The Digital Immigrants are older generations who have been, up until this point, governing our Western society (our American society).  They are the ones who are in the position to teach, govern, and control, but when technology is dominating society in a type of hyper-power out of the realm of understanding of the Digital Immigrants then thats when you get resentment towards technological learning and activities like Guru Meditation.  

Part 2:

Using the iPad, many if not all apps, are a simulation of other or "original" experiences.  Target has an app for the experience of shopping, the Kindle has an app for the experience of reading, but one of the app experiences that I find the most interesting and ironic is the Facebook app.
Jean Baudrillard's article, "Simulacrea and Science Fiction" states that simulacra consists of the natural, the productive, and the simulation.  Socializing online does just this.  Facebook, as a online social network, is a simulation of the face to face experience that society attributes to childhood development on through adulthood relationships.  Therefore when this physical experience is transformed into a virtual realty it takes on different forms.  
Facebook categorizes experiences with socializing into neat outlets by searching, tagging, poking, like, and/or the coined term "friending."  So when the Facebook app is downloaded, it is taking an already simulated experience and compounding it farther into an almost hyper-simulacra - a simulacra of a simulacra.
The Facebook app is simple and clean.  It's coded with the staple light, navy blue and white Facebook colors.  It offers the same features of the Facebook website with the ability to write on friend's walls, upload pictures, and even participate in Facebook chat. So why do we need it?  It isn't necessarily more "productive" than the Facebook website.  It certainly isnt any more or less "natural" than the Facebook website.  However, from a Baudrillardian view, the Facebook app is a new simulation of a social experience we are already participating in.  Although it may not be necessary, our culture like them because these types of simulations are in fact stimulating.  So once more, we like to be stimulated by simulations.
The controversy with such simulacrea is that it started to erode the expectations of points of origin, which in this argument would be face to face socializing. Baudrillard states, "It is no longer possible to fabricate the unreal from the real...". That said, a set reality is no longer grounded, nor is it further in Baudrillard's article, necessary to maintain. What is socially appreciated is the constant influx of more stimulation.  Therefore social interaction does not exist on a stable grounding, but rather on a new expectation of constant representation and fresh simulation like the Facebook app.