Claire's Questions for 2/25

Haltman’s analysis of a 1923 candlestick telephone suggests that the phone’s resemblance to the human form was “the first self-conscious telephone design, one based in large part on its makers’ psychological and emotional institutions” (83). Haltman provides brief descriptions and photos of telephones preceding and following the candlestick telephone; the wall phone only crudely resembles the human form which the French Phone eliminated “all suggestion of vertically or human form” (87). He suggests that the design of the candlestick phone calmed anxieties and softened the effects of the technology, but this assessment had me wondering why only this particular phone, which was the popular model for less than a decade before being replaced by the French Phone, was seemingly the only one designed with the human form in mind. Was it that our anxieties about technology and the phone deceased? Maybe practicality won over style?

Honestly, Baudrillard left me confused and feeling as though my personal ‘realities’ may merely be simulations. He provides several examples of simulations, which, in my opinion, seemed to get harder to gasp as he continues – Disneyland as a simulation of American reality makes sense to me, but he starts to loose me after Watergate. In one of his explanations, he suggested that a simulated hold up would be treated as a real hold up. This explanation had me wondering, if it is treated as a real hold up, does that not make it a real holdup – if it is perceived as real, is it not real?

Poster also discusses reality, but his discussion of reality takes use into the virtual world of the Internet. He suggests that “‘Virtual reality’ is a more dangerous term since it suggests that reality may be multiple or take many forms, ” and “the terms ‘virtual reality’ and ‘real time’ attest to the force of the second media age in constituting a simulational culture” (538). He explains that culture is simulational because the media alters the originals it discusses or displays. This discussion had me wondering if “virtual reality” is in fact reality for many people today. Poster wrote in 1995, and from what I can tell, much of what he suspected would happen in the future has in fact happened. Within “virtual reality” people create “virtual identities” (from what I can tell and based on Poster’s discussion of the fluidity of identity). How have our Internet selves influenced our “real” selves (if we are in fact real and not simulations of our virtual identities - my head hurts), maybe I should say who we are in our daily lives?