1. The screen is cold and clammy beneath my thumbs, and the little floating pixelated Bodhisattva keeps falling to the ground. The iPad demands attention; in the first two or three minutes, I closed my eyes and let the iPad become an extension of my body and upon opening my eyes I found that I had 'lost' guru meditation 19 seconds in. No record worth saving, according to the finished screen. Therein, I believe, lies the tension present in the Guru Meditation app. Is it allowing you to work through the iPad, so to speak, using it as a channel of concentration to achieve a sort of meditative state? Or is it in fact making you even more aware of your presence, sitting in a humid room holding a tiny computer and spending your brainpower focusing on a throwback Atari program? I wonder whether the answer to that question lies in whether or not Prensky would consider us 'digital natives' or 'digital immigrants' (or perhaps which we consider ourselves). There is a certain self-awareness about technology for a digital immigrant that a digital native will not even stop and consider. The digital native, so Prensky says, has been raised on the internet, cellphones, and television. It is more common to be in the presence of a computer or television than not. There is no need for a suspension of disbelief for the digital native. Therefore, the ridiculousness of the situation may be reversed; meditation through an app may be the most natural thing in the world, and the digital immigrants 'real' meditation feels pointless and silly.
2. tChessPro is the most highly recommended chess app I could find, according to various technology and dedicated iPad gaming blogs. I wanted a decent chess program. It seemed like a perfect match. What I didn't expect was how strange the mundaneness of the app would be; it, I believe, is participating heavily in Baudrillard's second order of the simulacra and serves as a hyperreal version of chess. First, and most amusingly, you are allowed to change the look of the board and pieces. It can be a simple grid with flat shapes (much like the boards that they use to show audiences moves in live matches), or a futuristic, sleek board with cloudy glass pieces, or a wooden board with 'natural' wood pieces. The program is taking what we expect of chess, the mundaneness and commonplace of a basic chessboard and pieces, and transplanted it into an electronic device that in and of itself is mass produced; a very real and grounded (as opposed to science fiction) version of Baudrillard's 'living room in space’ of the second order.
I find myself playing it less and less, however. Though I originally bought it to use as a fancy tic-tac-toe to play against someone else on a plane or car trip, I quickly realized that it includes a computer opponent. A computer opponent that is frankly unbeatable for one of my amateur status. I wonder if this doesn't function in the third order, a counterpart to the hologram space chess in Star Wars and an easy accessible, purely virtual version of the chess computers that rocked the world during the cold war. (And as an aside, one wonders how long until Watson can be downloaded as an app?)
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I very much appreciated the prefatory ambiance of your post. The idea that Guru Meditation can at once be a conduit to meditation and a game to lose (perhaps achieving both simultaneously?) sets up the intriguing problematic of your response--discussed at various times through various channels in class--in a beautifully concise manner. But I wonder if the "digital native" vs. "digital immigrant" discussion couldn't have been as equally clear? The closing statement about digital immigrants seemed to me to be more apropos of the digital native's potential approach to "real" meditation, for example. And this seeming inversion of comfort from "real" to "virtual" begs perhaps even greater implications than what Prensky suggests... a second textual resource would have been helpful here (and it was required).
ReplyDelete"How strange the mundaneness of the app would be." What a great phrase! Your insights into the tChessPro app struck me as provocatively reflective of our discussions about hard copy books vs. their 'soft copy' cousins. But the "hyperreal" quality of this game that you speak about falls under Baudrillard's third (not second) order of the simulacra. Are you perhaps playing with the idea of the hyperreal in another manner? I ask, because in the final paragraph of this post you draw attention to the third order of simulacra, which follows up directly from what is rightly described as "Baudrillard's 'living room in space' of the second order." This suggests to me the possibility of a productive synthesis of the second and third orders, w/ regard to the chess app in question. However, some further clarification (justification?) needs articulating.