Beginnings of Notes On Brenda Laurel's "Utopian Entrepreneur" (but only as it relates to my paper)

Banff VR project - an attempt to turn computers inside out. Rather than creating interfaces that act as channels or conduits of our reduction of input into a system and a thin stream of output in return, recognize the whole body as an interface. Extend your experiential capabilities, not just your information processing capabilities. (She calls for the user of simulations to help us stage the consequences of our actions and make more utilitarian(?) decisions. Funny that this is the very use envisioned for computers in closed world 1950s US while we were on the brink of nuclear war. But Laurel's technolgies are consequences of personal action, not organizational/governmental action. Successor to computer personalization possibility. For her, it really doesn't seem to be about connecting, but about staging. weird. read up on edwards' metaphors chapter if this becomes important)0

Cultural myths guide our imagination, guide what technologicall artifacts we produce and the fervor with which we defend them. These artifacts, in turn, guide and constrain our actual experiences and thus our imaginations. Earlier, she makes an argument that points to economic structures as what can make a big impact on how technologies are develop and whose rights are preserved by them. So she would argue, I guess, that cultural narratives and values that they display are, in some cases, made manifest in the transactions that take place in these economic structures. Certainly, an economic system such as capital creates and is created by a certain cultural narrative -- the invisible hand, high order right from individual actions performed by informed individuals. (Informed. Yeah. Many consequences are out of our perceptual grasp, as Laurel points out. You never see news stories about how your taxes went into a bridge that didn't collapse. Are there economic systems better suited for our strengths and weaknesses as humans?)

Feminist possibilties of purple moon -- very third wave. Don't judge. Just meet girls where they are, show them that they have options -- choices -- that will impact future situations. Give them a stage on which to rehearse and explore those options so they are better prepared to deal with daily life. But I perceive this tension between the online world being rehearsal space and the online world being part of the real space we exist in. In some sense, these computers as theatre are a place for girls to extend childhood's reduced accountability to an extreme of being able to "rewind" the virtual life. I suppose you can do that because you are not dealing with any humans on this stage of experimentation.

Is the virtual world a rehearsal stage for boys as well? Doesn't seem like it is one when I think of the hours spent playing quake and descent. Laurel points out that taking away violence in video games will just beget violence as a means of acting out, venting, showing agency in the form of high school shootings, violence. In some ways, this makes boys the ones in need of demon vents. What do girls need? A place to be bitchy?Is there research on how girls respond to video games traditionally played by boys?How much of their avoidance is access and boy culture and the lack of critical girl gamer mass and how much is it that they don't respond the same way? Maybe the gender inclusive game design book might have something on this.

If my key question is: What is the role of the computer in the feminist imagination? Laurel's answer might be: It is a site of cultural story telling by way of the role it plays in art, the roles ascribed to it in human interactions. It offers extremely broad possibilities, bound in our minds by its myths. So we need to encourage women, men, etc as equal participants in the myth making -- in the tools we design, the problems we try to solve, and the terms under which we partner with it.

What are Laurel's ideal terms for partnership with a machine?
Embodied interaction, safe space for "consciousness raising" in pre-"CR" people (read girls without a lifetime of marginalization to raise experiential consciousness about). Increase understanding of the world and others' experiences of it, rather than escape. Increase empathy.
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SEEMS IMPORTANT TO A PAPER ON FEMINISM AND HUMAN-COMPUTER INTERACTION TO DISCUSS WHAT IS NOT A FEMINIST HCI AS WELL, NO?
Edwards chapter 10 - Minds, Machines, and Subjectivity in the Closed World might be helpful.

Edwards (153): "Here we will find...neither scientists coerced into producing particular theories, nor of theories that merely reflect underlying relations of production. Instead, we will encounter...what Donna Haraway has called "constrained and contested story-telling." Such story-telling 'grows from and enables concrete ways of life."...'theories are accounts of and for specific kinds of lives." I think I'm interested in replacing theories with imagined needs and expectations reified in form and scientists with "designers." Which sorta brings you to Laurel by way of Haraway and Lakoff.
(157) "metaphor is not merely descriptive, but also prescriptive."

What kinds of power relations are written into the desktop metaphor of the Star? From LIza Loop, got impression that intended audience was not managers but secretaries -- the scribes and information encoding machine interface of the day. This would be somewhat of a historical project of digging through the old documentation and rhetoric surrounding the star, not what has been rewritten of its history over the time. And I don't think I myself could handle just reading the object.

(158) "master tropes provide what amount to basic structures for thought and experience." "politics of culture is, very largely, a politics of metaphor, and an investigation of metaphor must play an integral role in the full understanding of any cultural object. The mind is such an object and the computer is such a metaphor."