virtual miscellany

[Brad Mehlenbacher]

It's after 2 am on a Friday night and, after an all-day faculty retreat near Lake Wheeler (where I spent the better part of the day in a meeting room with muted window views of the outside), followed by dinner at a coffee shop where I sat under an umbrella and responded to incoming e-mail (beautiful, breezy night though), I find myself at home, toggling between watching the second last "Dead Like Me" episode while updating dead links on my two Blackboard/online classes.

I just learned, via Mark Pendergrast's (2003) "Mirror | Mirror: A history of the human love affair with reflection," that the first mirrors ever discovered were located in Iran and made of copper. They were dated 4000 B.C.E.

Sherry Turkle uses the metaphor of a mirror to describe our lives in simulated worlds, a much more complex and appealing metaphor than the overused metaphor of a tool.

As I "catch up" on one non-simulated day with another simulated one, I'm thinking some about the relationship between mirrors and time. I'm hoping that Pendergrast elaborates on this.

For now, though, this artificial work feels as human-made as my all-day faculty retreat near muted window views of a lake.