Sitch featured in The Walrus

Well, not really, but alot of the ideas are the same.

For those who didnt' see The Deviants, it was a collection of small plays (some of which) I wrote and acted for. One of the plays I wrote was entitled "Sitch": a story of a young woman rebelled against the future world she lived in, and organizing a collection of people to bring it down. The "world" she inhabited was a recent-future version of our society, where technology interconnects everyone to the point of reducing this to zombie-like creatures. The word I used in the play to describe this world was "flat".

Anyway, I just was in Indigo Book downtown and read an article in The Walrus talking about this issue, centred around a Human-Computer Interaction conference in Montreal. Pretty interesting stuff - reading it brought all my ideas rushing back from when I was writing the play almost 6 months ago.

Here is the article (free subscription needed)

One interesting thing the article bring up is that we treat our brains like computers; we expect our brain to memorize a fact or something on one read. I, myself, have to admit to frequent information amnesia. In fact, according to the article, the brain works very hard to forget information so that it only remembers the good stuff. The anecdote from the article is: "Imagine if when you saved a text document and loaded it later you only got back the parts you liked." I had never considered this when writing Sitch; I assumed it would somehow force people to remember everything. It would have been an interesting angle however.

"I'm sorry, the Sitch decided that remembering your anniversary isn't really relevant. Deleted."

Also, in the article detailed the work of some people now to make more suitable information organizers. Now, considering the way I wrote Sitch (Hint: It was a dystopia) I am skeptical, and pretty scared of all of these things. It's even worse when some of the ideas are exactly stuff I thought up (GPS-based reminders, etc.) Scary stuff. Well, at least lots of people are thinking about this issue, and it isn't just one mad scientist (me, from the future).