On "Beginning the Conversation"

Beginning the Conversation is Fred Ritchin's commentary on the possibilities of the creating conversations between disparate communities and individuals in the platform of the digital multi media experience. There is a certain democratic bent to Ritchin's desire to have multiple perspectives in viewing digital images in the future web 3.0. One of his initial concerns was the idea that the virtual interactive domain would somehow be informative in an organic way while also keeping the interest of the reader/participant. There is an interesting example of how one begins to have a conversation with essentially a computer program in his description of Luc Courchesne and Paule Ducharme's virtual project Portrait One. Here the participants in the conversation are a virtual representation of actress Paule Ducharme and the reader/viewer/participant who must keep up an "interesting" conversation for the exercise to continue; the human must engage in a decent conversation with an artificial intelligence. What an idea! I am intrigued by the concept of a computer program losing interest in a boring conversation with a human; it hearkens back to HAL in Stanley Kubrick's 2001, a precocious, sentient computer program that wreaks havoc on his human handlers. Ritchin goes on to a more in depth discussion of the possibilities of people having a conversation with virtual photo essays in the multimedia newspaper (Ritchin and photographer Gilles Peres' Bosnia: Uncertain Paths to Freedom). It certainly is an interesting idea with the multilayering of information that allows the user to determine the path of the narrative. The desire to include a forum for discussion in the end seems to be the major drawback to the project with sometimes racist vitriolic being posted instead of a measured discourse, an unintended effect of an all inclusive approach to virtual conversation. Ritchin is not unaware of the dangers posed by a world where we get our information from interactive multi media sites. Headlines that are missing from these virtual communication platforms are sometimes essential in creating a unified communal discourse needed for social movements. Also, the proliferation of "citizen journalists" may create a glut of information that is redundant or superficial. He suggests that there needs to be more filtering of content, but who would accomplish this filtering? Who would be up to the task of going through the vast amount of digitally rendered information to keep the conversation focused? It seems to me an impossible task, and one that only institutions could accomplish, which would have their own biases and agendas in the end. Perhaps we could develop an artificial intelligence network based on filtering programs that provides parameters that would narrow down the discourse; but then again that network would also carry the bias of its creator, and who knows, perhaps that network itself will, like the intrepid HAL in 2001, turn on its creators and develop their own responses to the affairs of humans. It's not out of the realm of possibility that reality meets science fiction.