Below is my contribution to Strawberry Singh’s “First & Recent Challenge”: two photos of my first Second Life avatar, wearing similar tops and standing in front of blooming trees in my (virtual) backyards on the SL mainland, separated by almost a decade. I’ve been in a few discussions about representing age in virtual worlds recently and this…
The title of this post is a quote from Arthur C. Clarke. I’m reminded of it frequently during a visit from my parents, who have an average age of 73. Despite the fact that I worked for Internet companies for more than a dozen years, they often view connected technology as some sort of sorcery.…
When I read MIT anthropologist Sherry Turkle’s book Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other last year, the sections on robotic companions weren’t my main focus but I found them fascinating. She wrote about observing interactions between older Japanese people in a nursing home and a robotic harp seal called…
It’s a theme that turns up now and then in science fiction: uploading the elderly to preserve their memories and save resources in meatspace. The short film Life Begins at Rewirement by Trevin Matcek takes another look: There are a lot of directions we could take in critiquing the film; we could spend hours on…
As personal technology has become ubiquitous, generational stratification in the US is increasingly being defined by how one interacts with tech. My friends of all ages tend to be early adopters and my personal experience is skewed, so sometimes I need to look up from typing, put on my anthropologist hat (a spiffy pith helmet,…