Perpective and Connection: Video Conference with UCI

This is in response to Jeff's posting on 2/14, regarding our video conference with University of California Irvine. I too had an interesting experience, this being my first collaboration of this type. Jeff spoke about eye contact (or the difficulty in doing so in an interaction such as this one) and I also feel there is something to be said about the potential impact this may have on communication or our responses/interactions with others in a venue such as this. Of note to me was the feeling of being "observed" by those at UCI, in that it somehow felt different from being filmed in a traditional sense. This could of course be due to the real-time aspect of it, but it seemed to create an interesting dynamic in the knowing that they could see me "now" (rather than as part of a film later). Not that I was worried about being observed :), but it was more of a keen awareness of their "watch" that was interesting to me (almost a feeling of being observed through a one-way glass). It made me wonder if a medium like this makes one "hyper-observant" of the other participant, perhaps more-so than if you were in the same room with them? It also made me wonder whether I was observing the people in the classroom (when the camera panned to them) more closely than I perhaps would have been had we been in the same room. Overall, the question of this medium and its ability to allow us to view or take things in in different ways is an interesting one.

I also found Jeff's comments about the multiple cameras interesting, in regards to how this affects perspective and "authenticity". This can relate back to our class discussion regarding the different camera perspectives that are now available (i.e. above a football field) that allow a more "disembodied" perspective (in that we are no longer "spectators", but more a part of the action). Does this make the interaction more or less "real"? Jeff also spoke of the multiple camera views as adding more of a "cinematic feel"; in a course I took on Media, Memory and History, we discussed the virtual (or sensory) effect that cinema creates (in that it creates an illusion of experience) and whether other media can have a similar impact based on that. How does this relate to an Internet2 experience, in regards to its authenticity and its impact? These are questions that can be explored further as we learn more about this medium.