Augusto Boal's work reminded me both of my own experience using theatre to prevent teen pregnancy prevention in impoverished areas of Honolulu, and also of that new Robin Williams movie, "Man of the Year." How exactly do you run for office, but not seriously, and then win?
As for Negroponte's work, I can't imagine architecture without computers. I'm sure it's still taught the old-fashioned way, with t-squares and all that just to make sure people know what they're doing (the same way we're required to learn math without a calculator before they let us use one), but it seems to me that modern architecture could not be designed without computers.
I couldn't find as much information about Weizenbaum's Eliza program as I would have liked. How did he implement it in such a way that people opened up? Did they know it was just a computer? What was his test group? I agree that we shouldn't let machines make important decisions for us, but I'm sure that in some cases we do, I'm just struggling to think of an example.
I didn't really understand the Deleuze and Guattari's book. I know they had to invent a new word to describe it, and all the strange words in it seemed much shiftier than the "language" employed in "A Clockwork Orange" which is still linnear. I just feel like it would be a chore to read the whole thing.
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1 comment:
Adele,
Good comments.
As far as Joseph Weizenbaum's Eliza program, look him up in Wikipedia and the links at the botton:
ELIZA is a famous 1966 computer program by Joseph Weizenbaum, which parodied a Rogerian therapist, largely by rephrasing many of the patient's statements as questions and posing them to the patient. Thus, for example, the response to "My head hurts" might be "Why do you say your head hurts?" The response to "My mother hates me" might be "Who else in your family hates you?" ELIZA was named after Eliza Doolittle, a working-class character in George Bernard Shaw's play Pygmalion, who is taught to speak with an upper class accent.
Cynthia
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