I'm not a doctor, but I play one on the internet...

In light of the class discussion we had concerning Hayles' comment (in "An Interview/Dialogue with Albert Borgman and N. Katherine Hayles on Humans and Machines") about the potential future of medical diagnosis:

"HMO's are considering programming their computers to make medical diagnoses and recommend treatments based on probability distributions. That's a timesaver, to be sure, but has it crossed the line between calculation and moral judgement?" (http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/borghayl.html)

I got to thinking about another aspect of the issue: humans interacting with machines to diagnose themselves. There have been cases where people, frustrated by a string of doctors who were baffled by their symptoms, tenaciously searched the net until they indeed did find others who were experiencing the same things and found a name for their malady (which then in turn led them to the names of specialists who could actually help them). That, to me, is progress, and something close to the kind of "productive partnership" between humans and machines that Hayles alludes to. But there is another side to be explored, and that is the (sometimes) relative ineffiency and hypochondria inducing nature of that cyber-quest for answers. Check out, for example, the "symptom checker" on WebMD:

http://symptoms.webmd.com/symptomchecker

All you have to do is plug in your sex, click on where it hurts, and (though you can further narrown down symptoms) bingo, up pops a list of possible afflictions (we are, as always, dealing with probabilities). For example, if I indicate I have pain in my upper abdomen, according to WebMD, I could be suffering from anything from depression to sclerodoma. The vagueness is amusing, though the list does provide me a starting point to dig deeper into the rest of those diseases. But I also wonder whether I would really be able to handle being told exactly what is wrong with 100% accuracy after a few clicks of the mouse. In other words, if I had a terminal illness, I would rather hear that news from a human than my pc.

Another issue I've noticed (not that I spend hours surfing for this kind of thing, but there have been one or two times-ok, maybe more like 20--when I was sick and just wanted a clue as to whether I should just ride it out or go ahead and make an appointment) is the incredible overlap of symtpoms that span minor to major illnesses. For example, let's say one is having fatigue, general malaise, a sore throat, minor headaches, and trouble concentrating. Here's my tasteless parody (though not too far removed from reality) of what that person might find if s/he tried to get to the bottom line.

Common Cold

Early Symptoms Include:

fatigue
general malaise
sore throat
minor headaches
trouble concentrating
(and so on...)

Prognosis: With rest and frequent intake of liquids, a full recovery should occur in a week or two.

Mononucleosis

Early Symptoms Include:

fatigue
general malaise
sore throat
minor headaches
trouble concentrating
(and so on...)

Prognosis: May require hospitalization at some point, but patients generally recover within a few months.

Bubonic Plague

Early Symptoms Include:

fatigue
general malaise
sore throat
minor headaches
trouble concentrating
(and so on...)

Prognosis: You will most likely die horribly. But if you do survive, good luck leading any kind of a normal life because you will be permanently scarred both emotionally and physically.


Ebola

Early Symptoms Include:

fatigue
general malaise
sore throat
minor headaches
trouble concentrating
(and so on...)

Prognosis: You will die really horribly. No seriously--you don't even want to know.

And, finally, (drumroll, please), I give you Swine Flu:



My point is this--this kind of information was always available to people in books, but who has ever had the time to go thumbing through medical journals? By the time you figure out what's wrong, you're over it. But with the internet, there's immediate access to that same information that can be detrimental in its futility.

Being Erica

Most people will readily volunteer the list of shows they watch as long as they are sure that list at least marginally conforms to what all the cool people are watching (things like "Lost" and "Grey's Anatomy," two shows that I have never seen, but feel as though I have seen because of the way blurbs about their gripping plots invade commercials and other media). I will, however, admit that I have seen a few partial eposodes of a new show called "Being Erica"; it's a series that's way too smart to be on SoapNet* (where it currently airs) but maybe too dumb to be on Bravo.

The issue is this: Being Erica has a premise that doesn't know how deep it is, and maybe this lack of awareness is what makes the show such fun to watch. I shall summarize:

Erica is a 32 year old single woman who is vaguely unhappy with her life because of myriad regrets about this and that. She is, in fact, all of us. She meets a shady shrink who somehow possesses the power to take Erica back in time to revisit certain times in her life to "fix" things (and during these extended flashbacks we, the viewers, are assaulted with endless 80s and 90s pop culture references; the show can be revoltingly self-referential). But, as Erica finds, fixing things is more complicated than she had envisioned, and often the original circumstances are not as she had imagined. This particular scene shows Erica trying to rectify a disastrous poetry reading in a college creative writing class from the early 90s--only instead of reciting the original poem she had written, she, due to the inexplicable antics of her stereotypical histrionic nutcase professor, is forced to rip off a Britney Spears song:



Being Erica, in fact, has a plotline eerily similar to an entertaining book I read in my late teens called The Strange Life of Ivan Osokin, by Russian author P.D. Ouspensky. Ivan Osokin, too, had many regrets and was in a rut much like Erica. Desperately seeking a chance to go back and change things and make better decisions with the mature knowledge he had as an adult, he happens to run across someone who can grant that wish. Ivan, thus, gets whisked back in time (only much further back than Erica--his first trip to his past takes him back to age 12). But, alarmingly, Ivan ends up making the exact same decisions--even bad decisions that are clearly going to have bad consequences. The novel is actually very funny--in the first episode, Ivan, even with his illuminated adult knowledge of right and wrong, is unable to resist the urge to draw a moustache on the portrait of his school's head master--an act for which he is severely reprimanded...again. Upon returning back to his present time, Ivan pleads to go back again and re-relive this event, asserting that this time he will not indulge in such childishness. He is granted the chance to go back, and whaddya know, he once again, even with full knowledge of the potential consequences, draws the moustache and gets his comeuppance. The point of the book is this: when we regret one of our actions, we have a considerable amount of distance from the circumstances, and often the truth is that, given the chance, we probably would still do or say everything as we did it then, because all of the tiny contextual elements we cannot even recall now dictated that response.

People love to say that hindsight is 20/20, but the truth is that even hindsight is blurred by our assumptions about the who, what, when, where, why, and how of everything that has happened to us. That book completely changed the way I think about memories and wishing for second chances, and now I'm seeing it warmed over in an hour long Soapnet show.

The ad hype for Being Erica (being as it is on "Soapnet", a station that shamelessly panders to the terminally brainless) promotes it as lighthearted comedy/drama for 30-something women who pine for the carefree-ness of their teenage years rather than the foray into wrenching metaphysical questions that the show actually is. What the writers and producers may not understand is that, in tackling the issue of regrets and going back in time to "do things better," they are tapping into some heavy moral and psychological territory.

*I don't actually watch Soapnet--seriously--it just happens to be part of the cable package I have that also allows me to get useful, academic stations like Discovery and the National Geographic Channel--by the way, if you've never seen that series called "Locked up Abroad," it is pretty fascinating too.

Eve Sedgwick

Eve Sedgwick passed away on Sunday after battling metastatic breast cancer for several years. Though my connection to her did not extend beyond class discussions of her work or a few citations of her theories of gender and identity politics, I was very saddened to learn about her death. She was 58 (she had been diagnosed in the early 90s).

Eve contributed here and there to a well established discussion thread for women with metastatic cancer. I had been following this discussion for a few years after a close family member died of the disease, and I remember seeing Eve's name pop up and thinking, "The Eve Sedgwick? No way!" But sure enough, it was her; a theorist/woman/patient suddenly made more real and unsettlingly vulnerable.

I never knew Sedgwick personally, but somehow her precence on bcmets made her so much more real to me than the pages of brilliant theory I had buried myself in as a graduate student. She was humble, kind, and encouraging in her comments to the other women on the list, and unless one already knew who she was, they would have never known that this prolific woman had written numerous well respected texts.

Robots and Bionics vs. Zombies and Vampires

"Priests and cannibals, prehistoric animals
Everybody happy as the dead come home
Big Black Nemesis, parthenogenesis
No one move a muscle as the dead come home"*

I have to admit, I do not understand the apparent obsession with dead people (or undead people) that has manifested itself in the form of popular novel trilogies and movies about vampires and zombies. I'm not saying I'm against this particular segment of popular culture, just that I am under the impression (perhaps woefully uninformed) that vampires and zombies can only do so much before they've played out their usefulness. Plus, they will never be part of reality (and this is where my analysis starts to get really subjective). They don't evolve or really contribute much at all to society, no matter how much theory we use to discuss their relationship to human culture. And because of that, they bore me. Before anyone starts throwing cyber-tomatoes at this post, I should point out that I did watch every episode of Buffy back in the day (my interest petered out with that "Angel" spinoff, though), I read all of Anne Rice's books when I was a teenager, and I actually count "Night of the Living Dead" (the original black and white) as one of my favorite movies because it has the distinction of being the first film that gave me nightmares (plus, the underlying social commentary makes it a classic). But, if I'm honest, I have to admit that I'm really more of an AI person than a vampire/zombie person (I hate to create a dichotomy where there may really not be one, but for some reason it seems like more and more we are called upon to pledge our allegiance to one or more cultish fads and, in doing so, exclude another).

I think what draws me to AI in popular culture and IRL is that, for one thing, the cyborg mythology really isn't a myth any more. Let's face it--"robots" have bridged reality and science fiction for quite some time--but now, it seems that, ironically, though in 1950 imagination could still far exceed what was possible in actual scientific application, we live in an age when imagination (as represented by examples of AI in films) is matched and even informed by actual application (for example, robots perform certain types of surgeries, and one was recently built that can conduct an orchestra, and then there was the infamous Deep Blue chess playing computer). Therefore, I think cyborgs, robots and bionic technologies in all their real or imagined glory are just plain cool. But this is coming from someone whose first favorite television heroine was Jaime Sommers, also known as The Bionic Woman; Who knows? Maybe if she had been "The Zombie Woman" instead, my devotion would go to the undead...

In this clip, Jaime (the perfect embodiment of Haraway's concept that we are all "chimeras" and human/machine hybrids) attempts to defeat a "fembot" while wearing sensible shoes (who knew fembots had Farrah hair?).



(Song lyrics courtesy of Shriekback's 1985 song "Nemesis," which used to play in constant rotation on 94.5 The Edge, a Dallas based alt station that no longer exists)

From Kairos 13.2's "Disputatio" Section

Dear God, this may be the funniest thing I've seen in a long time. That's all I have to say.

It is "English Downfall" by "theamishaugur," (the full url is http://kairos.technorhetoric.net/13.2/disputatio/theamishaugur/index.html) and here is the brief abstract:

"In a remix of the infamous Hitler meme—taking a scene from the movie, Downfall (2005), and adding subtitles appropriate (in this case) for Kairos readers—theamishauger makes a pointed, humorous (to some) commentary on the status of multimodal composition scholars in English departments during job market season."