The New Real

Turkle (Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other) recounts a visit to a museum where she and her daughter Rebecca viewed some Galapagos tortoises. Some of the kids would have preferred a robot: “A ten-year-old girl told me that she would prefer a robot turtlebecause aliveness comes with aesthetic inconvenience: ‘Its water looks dirty.Gross.’ More usually, votes for the robots echoed my daughters sentiment thatin this setting, aliveness didnt seem worth the trouble. A twelve-year-old girlwas adamant: ‘For what the turtles do, you didnt have to have the live ones’” (3-4).

A Disney executive told Turkle: “When Animal Kingdom openedin Orlando, populated by ‘real’that is, biologicalanimals, its first visitorscomplained that they were not as ‘realistic’ as the animatronic creatures in otherparts of Disneyworld. The robotic crocodiles slapped their tails and rolled theireyesin sum, they displayed archetypal ‘crocodile’ behavior. The biologicalcrocodiles, like the Galpagos tortoises, pretty much kept to themselves” (4).

Fake has become the new real.