This month I’m exploring the complicated dance between the quest for authenticity and the constructed realities of the current Digital age. As a society what will be the tokens that we share to prove our existence, our experience, or, relevant for higher education, what we’ve learned? AI tools, while creating new, seemingly impossible, opportunities for creativity, raise new questions around fabrication and authenticity at the same time trusted culturally-relevant gatekeepers and critics like Pitchfork fold.
I shared this (David Pernell Tweet) with my FYS students this week as part of a larger conversation about the importance of critical reading AND writing skills in developing and connecting ideas over the course of a semester.
You won’t remember this 🤔🤔- Kyle Raymond Fitzpatrick on The False Memory Economy:
“you choose to retouch pictures of yourself but save over the raw photos; you write something that Grammarly edits, sharing the edited version; you appear on a recorded Zoom call with the “touch up my appearance” option turned on”… These are every day “blips” in our lives, microaggressions of truth that we play on ourselves that we “don’t notice” but are our accidentally deletions of our own archive in real time.”
Want to chat with Marilyn Monroe? How about Lou Reed? Or maybe you want to listen to new Nirvana songs? Technology can make it happen (below is a fan-made Nirvana album)! While some of these are blatant money grabs and setting aside the ethical and legal issues, who’s to blame Lou Reed’s widow from wanting to have a tiny window back into her late partner’s creative spirit.
The sad Kate Middleton story from this past month is another reminder that in this new digital era “Nothing is True and Everything is Possible”. From Charlie Warzel Atlantic article Kate Middleton and the End of Shared Reality,
“…synthetic media seems poised to act as an amplifier—a vehicle to exacerbate the misgivings, biases, and gut feelings of anyone with an internet connection. It’s never been easier to collect evidence that sustains a particular worldview and build a made-up world around cognitive biases on any political or pop-culture issue.”
Fascinating origin story for how photos were transmitted to newspapers starting in the 30s. Wasn’t possible to apply Photoshop to this workflow… (via kottke.org)
Back in the day (early 2000s), a Pitchfork album review was perhaps the opposite of synthetic media. “Funny, rambly, and highly critical”, Pitchfork album reviews could start and end careers. I know I downloaded countless albums based on a Pitchfork review. This Pitchfork retrospective by Elizabeth Lopatto explores the evolution of the music industry over the last 20 years and the current state of cultural gatekeepers in our TikTok / music streaming era.
While I’m being nostalgic about music… the LA Times ran an ‘oral history’ of Weezer’s Blue Album this month in celebration of the album’s 30th year. It reminded me how important authenticity was to the grunge movement of the 90s. Released a month after Kurt Cobain’s death, the band “all wondered whether Kurt would’ve liked Weezer. That felt important”…. 🤔
I couldn’t help myself (link)… ChatGPT gets the historical context right - Cobain indeed did appreciate “authentic, emotionally charged music... and both mainstream and understand music…” but the fictional quote doesn’t sound anything like what I’ve always assumed Kurt would’ve said about Weezer which was “They suck”…
Many of the conversations that happen around generative AI and education centers on the idea that learning happens when we wrangle / struggle with information. When I design assignments for students that integrate chatGPT, I do wonder whether I’m making the learning process too easy… Chris Dalla Riva is asking the same question about music generation.
I once went to back to back Weezer concerts with my sister in high school… or did I just ask chatGPT to create a picture of me at a Weezer concert in 2001?