Science and Technology Studies Class Next Semester

Our Last Tech Outreach Presentation

Another Panel Discussion: This Time on the Concept of Intellectual Property

Here is the description of what the panelists will be discussing:  

Because intellectual property deals with ideas of how to do and make things (patents), expressions of ideas (copyrights), and symbols of goods and services (trademarks), it is an unlimited resource which contrasts with physical property which is a limited resource. Given its nature, is intellectual property an intellectual theft from the marketplace of ideas, or is it a necessary incentive to create new inventions, expressions, and goods and services?

Press From Stallman's Visit To The Weber State Campus

Here's a Standard Examiner article about Richard Stallman's October 30th talk on the Weber State University campus:

Free Software Pioneer Says It's All About Liberty

Here's another from the Signpost (Weber State University's student paper):

Free Software Activist Richard Stallman Talks Tech Ethics

Richard Stallman Coming To Campus

An Anthem to Teen Privacy: A Review of danah boyd’s It’s Complicated

When I was a teenager in the late ‘70s I battled my parents in a cold war over privacy.  My campaigns were punctuated by giving my mom the silent treatment and by moving my room to the relative privacy of the basement.  Those years were angst ridden and I’m a little ashamed of them, so I don’t dwell on them much.  But danah boyd’s It’s Complicated brought those memories back in full flood.  That’s because It’s Complicated is about the challenges which American teens face as they move from socializing in the home or other forums that have been structured by their parents into social spaces that they define for themselves.  These new spaces are primarily digital and they didn’t exist in the ‘70s.  But take away the digital and the teens of today seem a lot like the teens of yesterday.  They’re looking for privacy.

If, like me, you are 50 and teach, your first inclination might be to think that kids these days are different; that they are tethered to their phones, that they don’t know when to put them away at the dinner table or in the classroom, and that their fixation on screens is corroding their ability or inclination to read anything approaching the length of a novel.  While I’m not ready to let go of these anxieties altogether,  It’s Complicated allays some of them by showing a semblance of my own largely forgotten high school self in the youth of today.    That’s because teens now, as then, are trying to create social spaces that aren’t surveiled by their parents.  For the youth of my own day this involved hiding our partying, gravitating to a house where parents were absent from the scene, or hanging out at the mall.  It was hard enough to create privacy in the ‘70s but according to Boyd things have not improved greatly in the 21^st century.  That’s because teenagers still aren’t as free as adults.  And the constraints that adults place on them limit the ways in which they can socialize.  Teenagers don’t have as much access to cars as their parents.  They don’t have as many venues for gathering as adults do.  And the obligations of family life often require that they stay at home even though they would rather be with friends.  To transcend these constraints, youth naturally turn to social media since if they can’t meet as much as they would like in person, then at least the affordances of digital mediums allow them to still interact. 

On the surface it might seem that teens lives have improved, since the options for connection today are much larger than they were 30 years ago.  After all, modern teens don’t just have access to a phone on the kitchen wall, they also have access to Snapchat, and Twitter, and texting, and the avalanche of other social media that capitalism is plying them with.  But while these technologies offer more opportunities for connection, they also present  new challenges.  One of the more daunting of these challenges Boyd calls “context collapse.”  While attempting to communicate with one set of friends, messages and images often get disseminated out to people (and especially parents) that teens aren’t intending to communicate with.  In the ‘70s context collapse was easily avoidable -- we’d simply start whispering on the phone, or arrange to meet at the mall or somewhere else that was outside the oversight of adults.  But these venues, according to Boyd, are increasingly inaccessible to young people as malls have imposed more restrictions on teens gathering, and as adults, in an attempt to protect their children from perceived dangers of the modern world, increasingly limit where teens can go.  In the face of these predicaments, teens naturally (or at least very understandably) migrate online, even if there they face context collapse and surveillance by parents and others who hold power over them. 

Because young people seem to purposefully share more of themselves online then they should, and because they move online even in the presence of context collapse, it would seem on the surface that they aren’t all that interested in maintaining their privacy.  But Boyd makes clear this is a myth.  Youth today, as in my own day, are very interested in maintaining private spaces that aren’t subject to adult surveillance.  Unfortunately, 21^st century teens are cursed by the fact that this privacy is much more complicated to maintain online.  Youth in all eras face extraordinary challenges in coming of age.  Only now, the hardships seem amplified, more complicated, and more deserving of sympathy and empathy.

The fact that It’s Complicated elicits empathy suggests how good an ethnographer Boyd is:  through 166 interviews with different teens (that she conducted with the help of Alice Marwick), she’s rendered her subjects so intelligible that we start to think that we feel the way they do.  But while Boyd wields her ethnographic tools skillfully, at times it seems to prevent her from giving credence to more critical perspectives on teen life in a digital age.  For example, Boyd seems unwilling to take seriously Nicholas Carr’s worries about  the shallowness of post-print culture or his concern that modern social media presents ever more opportunities for youthful attention to be interrupted.  (Boyd, instead seems wedded to the very questionable apologia that Kathy Davidson makes for multitasking). 

Authors, of course, are entitled to their own intellectual predilections.  But these predilections  make Boyd indisposed to dwell on some of the costs that accrue to teens when they choose to connect through social media.  Boyd never pauses to consider that social media might be inhibiting youth’s ability to tolerate being alone.  Nor does she consider that aloneness when it’s experienced as solitude rather than loneliness can actually set the foundations for a more rewarding social life.  As a result, in It’s Complicated, the virtues of connection, sociability, and collaboration eclipse the virtues of solitude and disconnection. 

This partiality becomes especially manifest in Boyd’s discussion of privacy.  In It’s Complicated, the privacy that is emphasized isn’t the privacy that leads to time alone, instead it’s a type of privacy that allow teens to socialize more extensively with other teens.  That type of privacy is important because without it we’re unlikely to become truly socialized beings.  But it elides the other important benefit of privacy which is learning how to spend time alone and to use that time in rewarding ways.  Ironically, Boyd must know this since she has written a good book.  So she knows (or at least tacitly knows) how important it is to find places to write that aren’t interrupted by phone calls and texts and all the other social minutia that get in the way of a coherent and focused thinking.  But while she’s carved out this sort of privacy for herself, she doesn’t feel obliged to remind teens (or their parents) that they might want to hack some of this privacy for themselves as well.  And therein lies the central lapse in It’s Complicated.  The book draws an incredibly sympathetic portrait of how hard it is to be a teen.  And it makes a persuasive case for why we should cut teens a little slack about their digital habits.  But in making their sociability intelligible it fails to ask young people to develop their selves or their individuality by spending time alone, away from social media. 

This lapse is best illustrated in Boyd’s defense of two tenth graders who are recounting how time flies by when they use social media:

Lilly: It’s really awful with MySpace that I’ll click on somebody who’s sent a comment to me and I’ll look at somebody else, ’cause they have a “Top 10 Friends” and I’ll click on one of them, and then I’ll end up looking at people’s MySpaces in Tennessee and I started back with my neighbor.

Melanie: And it’s five hours later and you’re like, “Oh my God. Where have I been?”

While five hours might seem excessive and actually seems to border on addiction, Boyd tries to explain it away as an experience that is comparable to Csikszentmihalyi ‘s definition of the state of flow:

Addiction is one way to understand the dynamic that Lilly and Melanie are describing, but another is what pscychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi  calls "flow."  For Csikszentmihalyi, flow is the state of complete and utter absorption.  It's the same sense that's colloquially described as being "in the zone."  Time disappears, attention focuses, and people feel euphorically engaged.

I get Boyd’s point here but the comparison isn’t really a fair one.  Flow is something rock climbers or surgeons experiences while they climb or operate.  It constitutes complete, uninterrupted and utter immersion in an activity. And it requires being presented with challenges that tests one’s skills.  Social media rarely if ever induces this sort of immersion or immersion.  Instead, it’s all about interruption and flitting from one social interaction to another.

Some might counter that flow, just like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.  So if surgeons and rock climbers can experience flow maybe somebody can experience it while surfing social media or for that matter while watching television or washing dishes.    Still, I don’t really buy that line of argument.  When we fail to make distinctions about the relative merit of activities we stray into banality.  And conflating social media surfing with rock climbing or surgery only compounds this problem.  Which is why in the end I reject the comparison – as well as its tacit invitation to accept teen’s digital sociability more or less wholesale. 

Boyd has written an anthem to teen privacy.  And it’s an anthem well worth rallying behind because teens should be accorded the privacy that allows them to associate freely with other teens.  Still, this anthem isn't setting the threshold high enough.  Teens also need to learn how to channel privacy not only toward licentious ends but toward more redeeming ones as well.  They need to learn how to spend time alone.  At least if they want to learn how to write books that are as good as dana boyd’s.

Is the Telegraph Making Us Lonely?

Our presentation at the Theorizing The Web Conference in Brooklyn starts at 39:39 in the following video:

Home Invasion: Family Life and the Threat of Technology

This is the poster that we displayed at the Council on Contemporary Families 17th Annual Conference in Miami:

A fullsize PDF version is also viewable here.

My Colleague's License Plate

Studying Up: A Review of Alice Marwick’s Status Update

“When we up in the club, All eyes on us, All eyes on us, All eyes on us”
“Scream and Shout,” Will.i.AM

“Each one began to look at the others and to want to be looked at himself, and public esteem had value.  The one who sang or danced the best, the handsomest, the strongest, the most adroit, or the most eloquent became the most highly considered; and that was the first step toward inequality…”
“On the Origins of Inequality,” Jean Jacque Rousseau

Of late, when I’m reading a book, I’ll tweet about it.  Here’s what I said a moment before starting Alice Marwick’s Status Update:

I’m sure this is not the most scintillating tweet you’ve run across but it does illustrate a number of things about tweeting while reading.  First, I had included Alice Marwick’s twitter handle (@alicetiara) in the tweet which would notify the author that I was reading her book.  Although I’m sure I’m not the only one to have done this, I don’t think it’s a common practice on Twitter.  Who, after all, wants to tap into people who are life-streaming their reading of a book?  Even if the tweets are good, wouldn’t it be the case that (as the saying goes) “the book is better?”  Maybe.  But I do it anyway in the hope that the author will tweet something back and enrich the reading experience.  I also do it because of something Walter Ong, said about books in Orality and Literacy:

The Delphic oracle was not responsible for her oracular utterances, for they were held to be the voice of the god. Writing, and even more print, has some of this vatic quality. Like the oracle or the prophet, the book relays an utterance from a source, the one who really ‘said’ or wrote the book. The author might be challenged if only he or she could be reached, but the author cannot be reached in any book. There is no way directly to refute a text. After absolutely total and devastating refutation, it says exactly the same thing as before.

Ong, who died in 2003, didn’t know about Twitter.  But had he lived a few more years it’s possible he would have had the impulse to revise the above.  With Twitter the author can actually (occasionally) be reached, and the vatic quality of the book diminished.  By tweeting directly at the author, in the presence of one’s followers, one is, at least in some very diminished sense, attempting to subvert the vatic one-sided communication inherent in a book and move toward the give-and-take of an oral face-to-face culture.  Of course, if the author doesn’t reply to your tweets (and Marwick never responded to mine) then the vatic quality remains.  Score “1” for Marwick and a big “0” for me.

It might seem crass to keep score (even if I’m only joking about it) but it underscores one of the central points Status Update is making:  in Marwick’s view, social media users (or at least the users she studied in the Bay Area) tweet not only to exchange information but to increase their social capital.  And in striving to increase their social capital they also participate in modeling and practicing the type of activities that support neo-liberal economies that thrive on hustle.  Building on an argument first forwarded by Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron in “The Californian Ideology” Marwick contends that people involved in the Bay Area “tech scene” ascribe to a set of neo-liberal beliefs that give foundation and legitimacy to Silicon Valley entrepreneurial business practices.  On the surface, Silicon Valley presents itself as a counter culture that is epitomized in the figure of Steve Jobs who had more than a few hippy predilections including a vegan diet, youthful wanderings in India, and a [perhaps mortal] faith in the power of alternative medicine.  But while Silicon Valley may take on revolutionary and counter-cultural vestments, it’s more fundamental commitments are to neoliberalism and its celebration of individuals who compete freely with one another by selling and promoting themselves through markets.  While these cultural contradictions have been described by others besides Marwick (see for example Fred Turner’s, From Counterculture to CyberCulture), she throws in a kicker by arguing that these same contradictions have been embedded in so-called “Web 2.0“ social media platforms.  She observes that many people in the Valley believe that these platforms carry out democratic and egalitarian ends by facilitating connections and by spreading information.  While social media may do these things sometimes, in Marwick’s view, its more salient function is that people learn to use it for self promotion, for enhancing status, and for displaying oneself to others.   So in tweeting,  I too might have been “subjecting” myself to these same questionable models of social behavior.

As I was absorbing these points, I happened to tweet about them:

At the time, my tweeting seemed like a benign act.  I’d merely transferred my habits of annotating books from the physical marginalia of the printed page, into Twitter.  But if you apply Marwick’s theoretical framework to this act it takes on a darker more disturbing character.  To be sure I’m performing a Status Update (e.g. “Hey followers! I’m on page 6 of Marwick’s book and she’s making a pretty cool point!).  But I’m also probably engaging in a more competitive and performative act of updating (and promoting) my status (e.g. “Hey followers! Check out the erudite books I read!  Retweet it and maybe your followers will start following me).

While the second parenthetical is purposefully left unsaid when people tweet, seasoned Twitter users are aware of it.  And since we tolerate these types of messages and produce some of our own, we’re turning ourselves into subjects that model neoliberal ideals of virtue.  Marwick didn’t reply to this tweet either.  I can only speculate as to why but here are two possible explanations:    If she had internalized neoliberal subjectivity she probably wasn’t responding because her status wasn’t enhanced by connecting with me. Alternatively (and more positively), she didn’t respond because she didn’t want to participate in an interaction that gave further credence to neo-liberal models of the self.

In subsequent chapters on lifestreaming and self-branding Marwick argues that the performative self isn’t just a discrete behavior that people in Silicon Valley adopt while using social media.  Instead, it’s a behavior that pervades entire lives whether they are working, playing or socializing.   In the aggregate, Status Update is a compelling description of how some people in a particular time, and a particular place, inhabit and navigate through a neo-liberal world.

It’s worth emphasizing the fact that Marwick is talking about a particular time and a particular place.  Like any good ethnographer she tries to clarify the limits of her ethnography and the boundaries beyond which her analysis doesn’t reach.   But as readers, we want to know if the study scales.  Can Marwick’s observations be taken as a synecdoche of how the rest of us use social media?  Have the rest of us succumbed as completely to a neoliberal ethos as the Valley has?

Part of the answer to these questions lies in reviewing how others have studied culture.  In traditional ethnography anthropologists had a tendency to “study down.”  They took their craft to the ends of the earth, and instead of studying the colonizers, they studied the colonized.  Marwick has done the reverse.  She is mostly studying up.  She uses the rather regal twitter handle “@alicetiara,”   she hobnobs at the invitation-only conference Google Zeitgeist, she flies to the expensive South by South West conference, she cabs to “an opulent hilltop event space” for a Facebook party, she agonizes over what to wear in front of the step and repeat at the Webutante Ball.   This isn’t to say that there’s something inherently wrong in studying up.  Elites too deserve study and the requirements of participant observation (as anthropologists call it) probably justify the amount of time Marwick devotes to glamming it up with the tech glitterati.  But studying up, just like studying down, has its limitations and they are on display here.

First, the elites that Marwick studies are mostly in the business of promoting, selling, marketing and writing about technology.  Even though she’s married to an engineer, she spends little time talking about how actual programmers and engineers feel about their position in the mode of production.  Status Update in other words, focuses on the consumption of technology rather than its production.

Second, Status Update portrays a world where everyone is on the make, where everyone has become outer directed, where the authentic self is eclipsed by the edited self, and where everyone has become so consumed by self-presentation that nothing is left but an edited self.  This hyper edited self actually seems to be the subject that Marwick currently inhabits.  She’s @alicetiara instead of @alicemarwick.   She is circumspect in replying to tweets.  Her “mentor,” “champion,” and “collaborator” (as she states in the acknowledgements) is Danah Boyd who actually goes by the overtly edited moniker danah boyd.  Marwick “agonizes” over what to wear.  To be fair to Marwick it’s possible that we’re actually all pretty outer directed and that we all seek acclaim from others.  In the Discourse on Inequality  Roussau postulates  that this is simply a facet of becoming civilized.  So even if we don’t subscribe to neoliberalism, maybe Status Update is a mirror that reflects all of us.  And maybe Marwick is just being a little more honest then the rest of us about the fact that she’s outer directed. Still, it’s unlikely that we are outer-directed to the same degree.  That seems pretty clear when I associate with my plainly dressed programming colleagues, a good portion of whom occupy the top introverted quadrants of the Myers Briggs test.  It’s not like we don’t occasionally like to bask in the limelight.  But programmers wouldn’t be programmers if they didn’t derive some of their most enjoyable experiences from talking to machines rather than performing in front of others.  Pace Will.i.AM we don’t generally like to have “all eyes on us.”

Third, part of the purpose of studying up is to examine how the colonizers have subjected (or reshaped) the colonized.  Marwick does a pretty good job of showing how that has taken place in the Bay Area.  But it’s an open question as to how much the ideology of the Valley has colonized the rest of us.  I’m a programmer and I’ve programmed in Utah (sometime referred to as “Silicon Slopes”) for the last thirteen years.  Before that I programmed in Kentucky.   So I’ve met my share of people who live close to the Web and use the term “Web 2.0” in our daily working lives.  Many of us are still earnestly laboring to embed Web 2.0 principles in software.  But most of us aren’t involved in start-ups, or living anywhere near “the scene” (as Marwick describes the Valley), or subscribing in any conscious way to the tenets of neoliberalism.   In particular, when Marwick suggests that neoliberal ideology is part and parcel of whatever people have adopted when they subscribe to Web 2.0 principles and Web 2.0 technologies she is making an association that probably doesn’t have that much traction outside her field site.  The people who use the term most these days are programmers and designers who refer to it when they are trying to describe a rich user interface that is snappy and responsive.  It has a discrete meaning and its principles are subscribed to by programmers and designers of many different political stripes.  Some of them may be neoliberals but others of them are distinctly not.  Status Update however glosses over this more common usage and piles onto the term a set of politics that are not in keeping with the way the term is most commonly employed.  This isn’t to say that Marwick has invented her definition out of whole cloth.  She gets it from the way Tim O’Reilly and other hoi poloi of the Valley have tried to spin the term.  But the dissonance between her definition and the way it is used elsewhere illustrates the fact that her study cannot be easily scaled.   Put another way, Status Update may be a faithful portrait of life in the Valley.  But we should be careful not to let that portrait eclipse how technology is being produced and used in the hinterlands where social media may be being repurposed for other ends.

In studying up Status Update misses a large segment of Web 2.0 producers and consumers and the less narcissistic ways that some of its members have chosen to integrate themselves into late capitalism.  If cyberspace was developed in Silicon Valley (and that proposition might itself be a myth) its power base is diffusing rapidly out across the world.  To document this digital culture we’ll need to complement Marwick’s successes in studying up with ethnographies that “study out” and “study down.”  Until then we won’t know whether or not the colonizers have actually colonized the rest of us.

Super Lonely Semi-True Internet Stories: The Debate Over Sociability and Social Media Continues

If you keep up with the pundits who make a professional study of social media, you’ll know that some of them (including William Powers, Sherry Turkle and Stephen Marche) argue that social media doesn’t always make us more social. Two years ago, in “Social Media's Small, Positive Role in Human Relationships,” Zeynep Tufekci called into question these claims.  And now again, in “The Social Internet: Frustrating,Enriching, but Not Lonely,” she revisits the issue:

Communications technologies are neither dehumanizing nor isolating when they provide social connectivity. When my phone beeps because my ninety-year-old grandmother in Istanbul is calling, it is anything but dehumanizing. When my high school classmates rally on Facebook to morally, physically, and, if necessary, financially support one of us during a major illness, it is anything but dehumanizing. On the contrary, without the Internet most of us would have disappeared from each other’s communities and lives. And it’s profoundly humanizing when people first meet online and convert those relationships to face-to-face friendships, as about one in five people in North America have done.

These points are well taken: in many and perhaps most situations, the new technologies of connectivity do enable sociability.   But then Tufekci goes on to conclude: "Conceptually, empirically, and, above all, ethically, we have an obligation to end the moral panic that the Internet is making us lonely and isolated."  Does this follow?  Should we stop worrying just because the internet isn't in general making us lonely?  Oddly, in a move that calls into question her own conclusion, Tufekci volunteers many situations in which the internet isn't catalyzing sociability:

…if the “snail mail” annual family bulletin listing the year’s trials and tribulations is now sent by e-mail, or if engagements and pregnancies are announced only on Facebook, Aunt Edna, who’s not online much, may never hear of them. No one means to exclude her, of course, but the new way to systematically contact everyone on a list excludes her because she’s not online.

And Edna, of course, is only one example of instances where our communication devices marginalize people rather than bring them together into a tighter social fold. 

When I drive down the highway and reach for my cell phone rather than paying attention to the road, I’m jeopardizing a particularly important community of attention that keeps me and my fellow drivers in the land of the living and the land of the social.  And when my cell inadvertently rings during a presentation, that too disrupts an important social space.  The cyberasocial (a demographic that Zeynep may herself have coined) are another group whose social prospects also suffer as the rest of us flock online. In raising these problems I’m not suggesting that social media is having an aggregate negative effect on human relationships.  I’m just saying that there are further refinements that we can make as we adapt to our new technologies and that we shouldn't become complacent just because the glass is half full.

Tufekci also suggests that when we celebrate face-to-face communication over online, it can “become another way for people with privilege to claim a form of cultural capital that is denied to others.”  To be sure elites worry about these things.  But the laments are hardly confined to them.  In Susan Matt’s history of homesickness in America, she found many American immigrants use Skype and other communication technologies to commune with families left behind.  But while those immigrants valued the connectivity that Skype offered, they volunteered that their ability to assuage homesickness through a phone call home paled in comparison to an actual physical visit home.  I’ll venture to say that Tufekci embodies these sentiments in her own life: she may call her grandma in Istanbul but she also flies there in person a couple of times a year (or at least her Twitter feed suggests as much).

For Tufekci, our present worries are a "moral panic" (and possibly another venue for repressing an under-class).   But to pundits who give more credence to these concerns, a better description is “deliberative adaptation.”  When we release technologies into the world it takes a while for us to figure out how to use them wisely.  And it also takes time to figure out the contexts in which to avoid their use.  We’ve bought cable subscriptions and data plans and smart phones because we know intrinsically that these technologies expand and enrich and sustain our social selves.  Why else (unless we’re simple dupes of social media marketing) would we be spending money on this stuff?  But just because on average they’re improving our social lives, doesn't mean that it’s time to stop learning how to use these devices to our best social advantage.  Pace Tufekci’s protestations, that inquiry is still a worthwhile form of deliberation to be engaging in. 

Hybrid and Electric Vehicles Talk: What You Can Do To Minimize Utah's Air Quality Problems

Per the poster John Kelly of the Weber/Auto YouTube Channel will be presenting his talk at 12:30 on February 26th in the Fireplace Lounge in the Weber State Shepherd Union Building.

The Movie Her: Some Discussion Questions

Last week I assigned the movie Her to my one credit class titled "Coding Culture."  Below is a list of questions I fielded to the class after we had seen it:

• Can humans fall in love with machines?
• Do people in the future have technology fetishes?
• Does Samantha pass the Turing test?
• What is the technological aesthetic of the future?
• What is the significance of beautifulHandWrittenLetters.com
• In what sense is Theodore playing the same role as the sex surrogate?
• Is Theodore mediating love between humans?
• True of False: Is Theodore packaging up love in the same way as the company that produced Samantha?
• How much do we want our love packaged?
• Is Samantha is able to transcend the limits of the embodied self?
• What technology is naturalized in the movie that has not yet become naturalized today?
• How do humans in Her treat their mobile devices?
• What is the primary interface?  Visual or auditory?
• Why can’t Samantha continue to love Theodore?
• Would Theodore have been satisfied being one person in a harem of many?
• Did you notice where it was filmed?
• How far into the future is the movie depicting?
• Is this love 2.0?
• Is Samantha an embodied presence?
• Does Samanatha have any bugs?
• Should Theodore have been able to get a full refund after Samantha leaves him?
• How does Samantha compare to Theodore ex?  
• What does Siri think of Her?
• Is Theodore better by the end of the film?
• Is this a dystopian or utopian view of the future?
• Is machine love something to be hopeful for?
• Would machine love enhance or diminish us?  Is it better than anti-depressants?  How do they differ from depressants?
• What is the difference between a human and a machine?
• Why does Samantha pause when she talks to Theodore?  Does this make her less or more authentic?
• Can people only love if they experience other people’s limitations?
• True or false? "The robot, which at first seems only to be something one chooses because its 'better than nothing' becomes instead 'better than anything.' "
• Do you sympathize more with Theodore’s ex or with his long-time woman friend?
• Is Sherry Turckle's title of her book (Alone Together Why we expect more from technology and less from each other) a fitting description of what is happening in Her?
• What kind of love depends on our partner being an embodied presence?
• Does Samantha feel?  Or is it just performance?  What is the significance of her pausing?  Does she need to pause?
• Do computers need to be embodied to be truly human? 
• How much of a connection can we have with someone else if we don’t have similar limitations?
• What would it do to our own lives to have Samantha as a companion?  Would it diminish or enhance our lives?
• What are Sherry Turkle’s objections to robots?  
• Could robots cure loneliness?
• Is it fair to think of Samantha purely as a girl friend surrogate?
• Compare Her to AI to Lars The Real Girl.  How are robots represented in each film?
• Can we form attachments to non-humans?