Task 12:
Speculative Futures
My Prompt:
Describe or narrate a scenario about a piece of clothing found a generation into a future in which society as we know it has come apart. Your description should address issues related to cloning and elicit feelings of happiness.
My short story is inspired by a novel that I read a few years ago that took place in a dystopian future where most of humanity was barely surviving because we'd destroyed all the bees on earth. This lead to the destruction of pollination, agriculture, food supplies and life as we knew it. There were no more natural materials or fibres like cottons and wool because the earth had turned dry and lifeless. It was a terribly depressing story and there was a character who laments about uncomfortable, itchy synthetic clothing.
The Sweatshirt
I walked down the road in the deserted countryside town that I had once known as a girl. It was dry, parched, empty and so lonely. I was wearing mismatched sandals that were far too large for me and a make-shift dress that was made out of recycled garbage. It was the same for all of us clones, we had never experienced anything else, but we held the memories of the beings that we were copied from.
I was turning a corner and I saw a large tree in the horizon. Water I thought! There must be water somewhere if this tree has survived this long after the event. Suddenly, something catches my eye, something that resembled a piece of fabric, swaying in the wind, almost like a sorrowful dancer practising all alone before a performance. As I got closer, I realized it was a shirt, no a sweatshirt. It looked very worn and weathered but it was a soft, comfortable looking sweatshirt that must have come from days past. I reach the tree and pull down the sweatshirt, gently, like a treasure and begin to examine it. It still has a label! The writing is very faint, but I can make out 100% Organic Cotton. A treasure indeed. I have never personally experienced this kind of fabric but I have a memory from my clone sister that clearly is very taken with a garment of this make and quality. I feel a whoosh of happiness sweep over me and I hug the sweatshirt close. Its soft frayed hemline boast tiny threads that dance in the wind. I bring the sweatshirt to my nose and inhale deeply. It smells divine, like something pure and good and not of this world. I marvel at the thought of a world where people got to wear fabrics like this and live in comfort and ease. What a feeling it must be to be cocooned in this from head to toe. I feel that, even though I am a nobody clone, I somehow will have worth when I slip this over my head and around my body.
As I do so, I catch glimpses of the past through my human memories and try to remember what life was like before they destroyed it all with their greed and ignorance. I will enjoy my treasure for now and worry about finding water another day.
Task 10:
Attention Economy
This was a fascinating if not frustrating experience! It definitely mirrored some real life interactions I have had online over the years and accurately mimics the very annoying aspects of dealing with badly (or cleverly!) designed websites and other online entities that sometimes appear to have serious user-design flaws. It was not at all surprising to learn that a handful of tech companies are in control of what we see, hear and base our everyday choices on and according to Professor Tufekci in her TED talk, much of the AI driven technology that threatens our freedom and our dignity in our near futures are not terrifying, half-sentient Terminator like beings but rather companies like Facebook or Google that are systematically collecting, categorizing and selling our personal information to the highest bidders (Tufekci, 2017). As pointed out by Harris in his TED talk,Technology is not neutral (Harris, 2017) and this idea seems to connects strongly to another theory that I have been particularly interested in during my recent MET journey, that being ANT (Actor Network Theory) which posits that whether the technology we deal with on a daily basis (or any non-sentient object for that matter) be simple or highly complex, it shapes, configures and sometimes restricts human beings in ways that we do not recognize or acknowledge. In other words, the various technologies that we believe we are controlling, are really controlling us. These two ideas both support the idea that human beings (particularly our attention) are small players in a much more complex technological and media saturated ecosystem that is being controlled by a handful of the most powerful tech companies around the globe without our knowledge or even consent.
As I was beginning the UI “game”, I didn’t know exactly what to expect and didn’t have any preconceived ideas of what I was about to do. It took me a minute or two to realize that the game was purposely making the whole experience difficult and slow. It seemed to be designed to grate on the nerves of the player and test how long the player could hang in before throwing their device out the window! Fortunately, I did catch on that this was the point of the game and therefore was determined to finish it. There were particularly irksome elements such as the continuously popping up window offering help and then telling you that there were 400 hundred people waiting before you or the mismatch of pronouns and suffixes and probably the most irritating of all, the picture identification asking the player to identify which images matched the provided vocabulary. Overall, it was satisfying to complete the experience and I welcomed the thoughts provoked about how easily our psyche’s are shaped and manipulated by the very technology/companies that are supposed to be making our lives easier.
References
Harris, T. (2017). How a handful of tech companies control billions of minds every dayLinks to an external site. [Video]. TED
Tufekci, Z. (2017). We’re building a dystopia just to make people click on ads Links to an external site.[Video]. TED
Task 9: Network Assignment Using Golden Record Curation Quiz
I thought the first part of the Golden Record task was daunting! Part two was even more intimidating for someone who has a general dislike of anything numerical, data centered and quantitative in nature. I was able to load the zip file into the Pallado data generator and come up with a very beautiful web of our classes' interconnected choices of songs from the Golden record task 8. But, sadly, that was as far as I got. After speaking with Dr. Peño in our last Zoom session, he suggested looking at other original Golden Record tasks to see if that would give some insight into some of the reasoning of the shared/contrasting musical choices that were the basis for task 8. So that is the route that I have taken! It is quite amazing that there are a few peices that absolutely everyone chose and for no particuarily good reason. It almost makes one think that there is some kind of collective decision making going on within the human consciousness. I enjoyed these tasks very much and was delighted to see one of my very young students wearing a Golden Record t-shirt curtesy of NASA recently and even better, he knew what it was (this boy was eight years old!). I will make it my mission to find a larger version of it for myself in 2024.
Task 7:
Mode -Bending
For this task, I took the original Prezi presentation that I created and attempted to turn it from being primarily a visual and text heavy presentation into an audio mode. I took the idea from the first task and repurposed it in the form of a podcast. I didn’t want this podcast to be a “talking head” of myself merely repeating what I had typed in the original presentation, so I decided to ask a friend to help me by allowing me to interview her about what’s in her bag. This made the podcast more fun, dynamic and of course interactive than if I had just recorded myself.
The reason I chose this friend in particular is because she and I share many similarities in terms of our jobs, history of living in Japan and roles as mothers, teachers and women of the 21st century. I suspected that her bag would be highly comparable to my own bag which kept with the spirit of the original assignment. This did prove to be quite accurate and in the end her bag turned out to be around 99% similar to my own (minus the fact that she actually takes care of her sunglasses!). So, I was able to keep the integrity of the original content while interviewing a completely new person.
I love podcasts and have been listening to them for many years and find that listening to them is easier to insert into my busy lifestyle than reading traditional texts or books. Learning to write and record podcasts has been an integral part of my MET journey and the ability to be able to mode-bend, or engage in meaning-making and communications in the digital age, and being well-versed in different semiotic modes - visual, textual, and verbal as postured by Dobson & Willinsky (2009) is a highly important skill set to encompass in the field of current and future educational studies from both a student and educator’s perspective. I enjoyed making this podcast and I hope you will enjoy listening!
References:
Dobson, T., & Willinsky, J. (2009). Digital Literacy. In D. Olson & N. Torrance (Eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of Literacy (Cambridge Handbooks in Psychology, pp. 286-312). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Please click on the link and it will take you to the full episode. The podcast is about 13 minutes long, perfect for a quick walk. Please ignore the Chemex coffee tutorial, or not, it makes a delicious cup of coffee!
Task 8:
The Golden Record
Task 8: The Golden Record
This is by far, one of the most interesting and most difficult tasks I have undergone so far in any MET course! I am a great fan of music and space exploration and therefore, it might therefore seem like a dream task, but it was not. I spent two weeks listening to the 27 tracks multiple times and thinking about the different approaches I could use to curate the 27 songs down to only ten. Every cut felt like a betrayal to some great composer, some culture, some country, some time period. For someone who is already trying daily to edit my own belongings (both real and digital), having to ponder the cutting of such beautiful and epic songs from an already very short playlist, was kind of devastating. In the analogue age, according to Dr. Smith Rumsey in her presentation at Brown, it was all about what we could save; whereas now, we must ask the question “What can we afford to lose?” (Smith Rumsey, 2017). This is indeed a pertinent question for the digitized day and age that we live in.
I tried approaching this task from various angles. Most importantly, I wanted to try to keep in Carl Sagan’s spirit of inclusivity and represent as much of the world ethnic populations as possible, but I quickly realized that there is far too much to represent for the available space. I considered taking a random survey of friends and colleagues to spare myself the burden of having to decide on my own. I thought about categorizing it by instruments and then try to include as much variation of them as possible. This could also apply to rhythms, styles, musical genres, the list goes on. There did not seem to be any perfect way to do this which would ensure equal representation of any one aspect of these musical or cultural elements. In the end, I decided to just choose my favorite ten of the twenty-seven and, although highly subjective and in no way necessarily representing the many millions of humans on this earth, this selfish way of choosing the songs seemed almost fair.
References:
Brown University. (2017, July 11). Abby Smith Rumsey: “Digital memory: What can we afford to lose?”Links to an external site. [Video]. YouTube.
Taylor, D. (Host). (2019, April). Voyager golden recordLinks to an external site. [Audio podcast episode]. In Twenty thousand hertz. Defacto Sound.
The songs I chose:
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(Mozart, The Magic Flute, Queen of the Night aria, no. 14. Edda Moser, soprano. Bavarian State Opera, Munich, Wolfgang Sawallisch, conductor. 2:55) I love opera and Mozart so this was an easy choice.
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(Beethoven, Fifth Symphony, First Movement, the Philharmonia Orchestra, Otto Klemperer, conductor. 7:20) This is an epic piece of music and I never get tired of listening to it.
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(Bulgaria, "Izlel je Delyo Hagdutin," sung by Valya Balkanska. 4:59) This piece is timeless and hauntingly beautiful.
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(Java, court gamelan, "Kinds of Flowers," recorded by Robert Brown. 4:43) Beautiful, calming and gentle on the ears
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(Mexico, "El Cascabel," performed by Lorenzo Barcelata and the Mariachi México. 3:14) This was the closest thing on the record to salsa, merengue, and reggaeton, all of which are personal favorites because of years of Latin dance.
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(India, raga, "Jaat Kahan Ho," sung by Surshri Kesar Bai Kerkar. 3:30) I love traditional Indian music and this also represents my partner's heritage.
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("Dark Was the Night," written and performed by Blind Willie Johnson. 3:15) According to the Twenty-Thousand Hertz podcast this song is about having nowhere to go on a cold night. This was both authentic and heartbreaking and representative of our imperfect humanity.
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(Peru, wedding song, recorded by John Cohen. 0:38) Like my previous pick, I was enchanted by this lovely song and the story behind it about a woman singing sorrowfully about having to wed too young.
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(Japan, shakuhachi, "Tsuru No Sugomori" ("Crane's Nest,") performed by Goro Yamaguchi. 4:51) This one felt a little obligatory since I have been living in Japan for the past 20 years! Also, my father and I were both flutists and I love the serenity and simplicity of the flute in traditional Japanese music.
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(Bach, Brandenburg Concerto No. 2 in F. First Movement, Munich Bach Orchestra, Karl Richter, conductor. 4:40) I couldn't leave out Bach could I?
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Honorary mention goes to the Whales songs which are more beautiful than anything else on this list!
Task 6: An Emoji Story
To begin with, this was harder than I had imagined it to be and although I thought there would be only one approach initially, there turned out to be several! It was, however, quite fun to do and I enjoyed trying to find the emoji that would match the ideas that I was trying to relay.
I relied mostly on either words with matching images or matching numerical symbols. There were quite a few words that I couldn’t find representational images for including some abstract ideas such as feminism and patriarchy. I did not try to use syllables or sounds to explain the plot.
I did start with the title and that was the easiest part. The plot proved more difficult! I tried to keep the symbols in a linear order but since the plot of the book moves back and forth in time, that was also challenging. My first step was to actually type out the plot using text and from that point I tried to match as many images up with the text that I had already written. This didn’t work at all.
My next strategy was to think about the plot line and match the images that fit, afterwards I rewrote the text to match the symbols. This worked out better and ended up making more sense.
This was the second to last book I finished reading and I didn’t choose the last one because it was a highly complicated story set in post-colonial India and I was concerned with trying to represent different ethnicities/cultural ideas sensitively and was fearful of potentially using images that may deem offensive or inaccurate. This story was about a character that I could very much relate to.
There were many other details I would have liked to include but could not find the images for or think creatively enough to imagine with multiple images grouped together. It would be quite fun and creative to have the job of emoji creator and I wonder how one would qualify for that job? 😁 I predict that anyone who has read this book or seen the new show (which just aired in Japan a few days ago) would immediately recognize this plot through the emoji’s but I am not sure if anyone else would as it is a fairly recent and specific genre of novel/drama.
is.
Book Title: 👩🏫📓🚮🧪👩🔬
Plot: 👩🔬1️⃣9️⃣5️⃣0️⃣👑👩🦳🥼🧑🍳📺🌎
❤️👨🔬🚣♀️🕡🦮😭🤰👩🍼👩👧🚣♀️🥘⏲️👗👱♀️✏️👩🏫🔪
🍽️👧🧒🧪👩🔬
This was my original textual description The story is about a woman named Elizabeth Zot in the 1950’s who is a brilliant scientist/chemist who tries to work, contribute and succeed in a completely male dominated, patriarchal society, industry and field of academia that will do anything it can to push women out and maintain the status quo. She ends up finding a romantic partner, adopting a very smart dog called 6:30 and having a baby daughter. Additionally, Elizabeth changes many of the lives of the people she’s touched through her modern, feminist angled cooking show.
This was the text I wrote after I did the emoji writing A woman scientist in the 1950’s named Elizabeth. She is a female scientist and a cook who teaches cooking on TV in front of a global audience. She meets and falls in love with her scientist partner who introduces her to rowing. She adopts a dog named 6:30 and then her partner dies and she is devastated. She finds out she is pregnant and has a baby girl and becomes a single mother. She keeps rowing, cooking and host’s a 50’s era cooking show in a tight dress (which she hates) but she always keeps a pencil in her hair as both a tool and weapon! She teaches women how to cook and do science together. At the end of each show, she asks the children to set the table so their mother can have a moment to herself. Eventually, she goes back to chemistry.
Task 5:
A Twine Story
Writing a Twine Story is always fun and a bit challenging for me as I love to write but I do not have a creative bone in my body when it comes to storytelling. I can write commentaries, satirical pieces, academic papers, and so on but ask me to write an original, fictional story and my mind goes blank. As Bolter writes in in Writing Space, traditional storytelling and writing with printed genres are linear, hierarchical and static whereas creating stories in a hypertext medium, Twine being an excellent example, is multiple and associative (page 42). Twine gives its readers (or rather players) agency by providing the opportunity to interact with the story and make various choices along the way. This is a novel approach when compared to thousands of years of written text that does not allow the reader any choice except to follow the selected linear path.
Twine stories using only text are fairly simple to navigate and I have used Twine in various courses previously with good results. This time, when I tried to add images alongside my text, it seemed to be more complicated than I had previously remembered and it reminded me that this kind of digital hypertext technology is constantly evolving and always prone to updates and reconfiguration.
Playing The Temple of No was probably the highlight of my whole day! It was fun and not too serious and paid homage to one of my all time favorite movies. I liked that the reader/player was able to choose from several persona’s/genders to begin with and then lead to multiple story-lines and cheeky choices along the way. This is creativity that hypertext that does not take itself too seriously and demonstrates an accessible, modern and refreshing genre of storytelling. I enjoyed the casual, sometimes coarse language the author uses and felt that the experience let the reader/player escape the real world for a little while, which is always the point of good fiction/game-playing.
Overall, this was a great experience and gave me a chance to use the Twine platform again. My story was not terribly interesting but rather produced out of a stream of consciousness on my part. I wrote the story in two parts and most of it was either completely silly or entirely true. I’ll leave the reader to guess which was which.
References
Bolter, J. D. (2001). Writing space : computers, hypertext, and the remediation of print. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Task 3: Voice to Text Task
My Story:
Okay so I am starting this unscripted dialogue by introducing the object of my attention and energy for the last several months aside from my own work and study and family of course and that is our beautiful new golden retriever puppy Thor so Thor is something someone somebody however you want to classify a puppy that we have been waiting for a very long time for so in Japan it's hard to find rental apartments that will let you have animals and we had a lovely apartment for many many years that allowed people but not pets so one of the things that we were really hoping to do when we bought our own property was to be able to have a puppy and in hindsight it was probably a little early to get a dog I now wish that we had waited possibly until I had finished my own studying at the end of this year and maybe until my girls were a little bit older but the bottom line is we found this beautiful golden retriever puppy and we absolutely fell in love with him and we decided to take him home so that is the very simple explanation of how he got him he is an American Golden Retriever and we brought him home when he was just 8 weeks old and now he is a little over 4 months old and I've had Golden Retrievers in the past but I'd never had one from such a young age in fact I'd never had a puppy from such a young age I think since my childhood and so I was expecting this very friendly pretty silly docile golden retriever based on my past experiences with golden retrievers and in fact Golden Retriever puppies are quite challenging and I guess I was pretty naive to think that we weren't going to have our challenges so one of the biggest challenges has been like the biting the biting was not expected honestly I didn't think golden retriever was a biting dog but I guess what I have learned from this experience is that all puppies like to bite especially when they're teasing and exploring everything with their mouths and it's just really a natural phenomenon for them he is still biting I've done lots of research and apparently it should cease in a couple more months the only major problem has just been with my with my children cuz I have a three year old and an 8 year old and of course you know the major the major issue there is that they get bitten quite a lot and that's a major major problem as you know if you've ever had a dog bite a child it's not good so we're working on that we've been giving him lots of things to chew on and I've been learning about these really cool puppy toys that you can stuff with dog food and peanut butter and they puzzles Puzzle toys for dogs and we're trying to keep him occupied with that he's also growing very quickly so he's gone through a couple of leads and I want to call them halters but they're not halters I was raised on a farm with horses so they are the thing that you touch the lead to I can't think of the name of right now yeah so at the moment we go out for a couple of daily walks I used to do miles and miles of running with one of my previous golden retrievers so that was another kind of surprise of the puppy cuz he really can't you can't run with a puppy in fact this puppy has shown some pretty severe stubbornness and laziness so far in the fact that I get him so far as our our condominium Lobby and he just sits down and refuses to go any further he's like yeah this is enough I've had enough take me home and carry me up the stairs because I'm too tired already so again puppy facts that I hadn't really known about this age of golden retriever still needs to sleep up to 18 hours a day so puppies just like human babies need their sleep otherwise they get overtired grumpy you know way too stimulated and completely out of control so if you are thinking about it getting a puppy Go for it but keep in mind that puppies are not like adult dogs I know this Probably sounds like complete common sense but I just didn't really think think it through even after years of dreaming about having a dog again and yeah they require a lot of patience and attention and of course love and you've got to be willing to play and you know really get down on the ground with them and and yeah just be super super attentive to them so I will show you a beautiful picture of my new puppy and I hope that you have enjoyed hearing about my adventures in puppy land up until today.
Questions for consideration:
1. How does the text deviate from conventions of written English?
I used the voice typing feature in Google Docs to record and textualize this story. This text is highly casual and is filled with many verbal fillers such as: so, umm, yeah and like. It does not contain any of the proper grammar or punctuation that even a casual text or email might contain. It deviates in context to some degree and shows that the speaker (me!) gets lost, can’t remember words for things, or loses their focus at times. There are no full stops whatsoever and so it is difficult to know when sentences start and finish and this is confusing for the reader (even when the reader spoke the written words). There are short colloquial forms of words like ‘because’ and quite a lot of words that appear to have been repeated in several instances. It reminds me of a stream of consciousness prose of a teenager who is just a little bit unfocused and dreamy.
2. What is "wrong" in the text? What is "right"?
There are numerous things wrong with the text including a lack of grammar and punctuation. There are a few misspelled words or words that have been recorded incorrectly. There are also some instances of capital and lowercase letter mix-ups. There are no indentations or paragraphs to show where one idea ends and where another starts which makes it tiring to read. There are not too many spelling mistakes and the voice recording did catch some of the abbreviations that I used. I think despite the story being kind of non-linear, the main ideas are clear and a reader can still understand the story line and follow along with the details.
3. What are the most common "mistakes" in the text and why do you consider them "mistakes"?
For me, the fillers and lack of punctuation are the most common mistakes. I consider the fillers mistakes because they make it sound too casual and very unprofessional. There are also some inconsistencies with the way numbers are presented. The lack of punctuation really irritates me as it is something that I highly value. My husband constantly sends me messages lacking in punctuation and sometimes I really have to guess what he is saying because of a missing period or question mark! The repetition of words is also a significant problem for me as it makes the storyteller sound unfocused.
4. What if you had "scripted" the story? What difference might that have made?
If I had scripted the story, it would have had fewer fillers and sounded a lot more structured and intelligent! I am not sure if the lack of punctuation would have changed that much as I was not asking for full stops or commas at any time. The scripted story would have likely sounded more focused and I would not have deviated from the story trying to remember vocabulary that I was unable to think of on the spot during the unscripted version. It is possible that the story would have had better wording, more eloquent sounding vocabulary and overall more well done. However, there is also something charming and humorous when something is unscripted and that has its own value as well.
5. In what ways does oral storytelling differ from written storytelling?
Oral storytelling is like beautiful songs being sung and requires impressive feats of memorization. I have never been able to memorize even simple song lyrics (my three year old can sing entire songs from Disney’s Zombies, so thankfully it doesn’t seem to be genetic). I have always needed “an external storage device” (Gnanadesikan, pg. 2) or rather a way to record anything important, and so the idea of a person who can remember and repeat entire stories, is magical. Oral storytelling is not recorded as written storytelling is and so is retold in different ways by every person who tells the story. Each storyteller would bring their own distinct personality, nuances, and wisdom to their storytelling while written stories remain relatively unchanged despite the fact that many millions of different people may have access to them. Oral storytelling is limited in its scope of audience members while thanks to the invention of first the printing press, and later the internet, written stories are accessible by anyone who is literate and has the technology to access them. I am not sure if audio-books can be considered oral storytelling but they are something that have been quite transformational in my life in recent years as I am able to listen to books that I would have ordinarily not had time to sit down and read, in the form of audio on my daily commute.
References:
Gnanadesikan, A. E. (2008). The first IT revolution. The Writing Revolution, 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781444304671.ch1
TASKS 1~12
Task 1: What's in your bag?
Task 2: Does language shape the way we think?
1. Dr. Boroditsky mentions verb usage and placement in various languages [02:25]. As a language teacher and student for many years (I remember the trauma of French verb conjugations all the way back to grade seven). It got me thinking about the ways I have let the idea of verbs (along with anything number related) configure my language learning process and often contributed to the mental wall that I erect to excuse myself from being able to speak another language very fluently. I don’t struggle with verbs in Japanese except when using the casual or honorific forms (which happens frequently I must add) and I never got to past tense verbs when I was studying Spanish formally. So I feel highly inadequate when using verbs in Keigo (Japanese honorific language) and in Spanish as well. Verbs, like numbers, have felt like an unmanageable burden for much of my life! 2. Dr. Boroditsky displays a Charlemagne quote here [08:34] “To have a second language is to have a second soul.” As a multilingual learner, I love and agree with this quote and believe that it rings very true. I feel like a completely different person depending on which language I am speaking. I have never really enjoyed or felt a connection to Japanese despite the fact that I have really benefited by speaking some passable Japanese over the years while living in Japan. Additionally, I don’t necessarily like the personality traits that come out when I am speaking Japanese. Examples would be that I come across as overly polite, ladylike and diminutive in Japanese. The language along with the gestures that accompany them, such as covering a smile or incessant bowing, is in direct correlation with how women’s roles in Japan have been defined even up to the present day. I speak and act completely differently when I use Spanish, and although my proficiency is very low, I feel confident, alive and passionate when I speak or listen to Spanish. English is my native tongue and when I am able to use English, I usually feel confident and well-spoken. Each language brings with it a different persona or ‘soul’ and level of confidence as well as a way of looking at the world. 3. Dr. Boroditsky asks a question to the audience about geographical directions and nobody knows which way is south east [14:36]. I found this part very charming and comforting due to the fact that I am completely hopeless with directions and have no geographical skills. I cannot read a map and when given more than two direction instructions at a time, I instantly forget (perhaps a result of being part of a modern day literate vs. a traditional oral storytelling society?). My very patient father, who rarely got upset or flustered with me, gave up on teaching me how to do two things in life: first, how to drive a stick shift and second, how to describe/follow directions! Like verbs, directions have haunted me a little bit. 4. In these sections Dr. Boroditsky discusses some cultures that lack the linguistic equivalent of numbers and therefore numeracy literacy and then talks about friends who can improvise music skillfully and how this seems magical to her [38.00/39:35]. The first part made me ponder about what our modern, western, capitalistic society would be like if numbers had never become introduced into our language. Would we be less advanced or more so? (this being highly subjective of course). Would we be less obsessed with time, money, capital, consumerism, etc.? As mentioned previously, I have battled with math my whole life and still have trouble doing very basic equations. I likely have some form of dyscalculia and this may be the reason for my challenges although I have never been formally diagnosed. So, although I can improvise musically with ease, people who can calculate things in their heads or are skillful at working out number related problems, or economic principles, are magical to me (this goes for people who can cook without recipes too!). 5. At [50.44] Dr.Boroditsky talks about the difficulties of translating between languages, even when they are closely related. As a language learner in Japan for more than twenty-years, I can attest to the truth of this statement and can confirm that many words and phrases cannot be directly translated from Japanese to English and vice-versa. A few examples of this are some phrases used daily in Japan such as ‘Otsukaresama’ which Japanese people use all the time, but especially at the end of the day. It basically means, thank you for your hard work today, yay its over! Another favorite of mine is to ‘gaman’ which means you need to stay at something and persevere even if it's something you hate and find difficult or tiresome. This is not just language but an integral part of Japanese culture; you are not meant to give up on things even if they are hard, you must persevere. These ideas are both deeply ingrained into the Japanese psyche and everyday customs which demonstrates how closely linked language and culture are and to question whether or not language shapes the way we think is almost laughable to me; as someone who has spent time in various countries and cultures around the world, I would argue that language is something that shapes and defines us irrefutably. 6. Oh Jane Austen! At [53.56] Dr. Boroditsky brings up the idea that some fiction is geared towards developing the ability to read others' as well as how people might perceive you. I found this very interesting as I am a huge Jane Austen fan and have read most of her novels at this point in my life, and I am also quite a perceptive and empathetic person which makes me wonder if there is some causal connection between my literary choices and my skills at reading/understanding people!