My dog reminded me of something today. I worry that she is bored since my other dog died last year which was a puppy that I had gotten to help her with her separation anxiety. It worked out perfectly. She died unexpectedly, though, last year. I have been wanting to get another dog for her so that she will not be bored and so that they can talk with each other about how people could not survive without them. I was worried that she was bored and when I worry, she reminds me that she is already outside enjoying the outdoors. Today she told me that her body is just a construct. I have never really understood what that meant. Sometimes she uses words that don’t match the situation that I am thinking of, and I laugh out loud at her. She laughs too but her facial expression is always the same. She makes fun of me with that same facial expression. She reminds me how weak I am as a person and then she laughs at me with her dead pan face. So, I told her that I have never really understood this sort of saying but she explained the idea to me right away, ‘I am only a construction.’ I finally got it! When people talk about how age or any other situation is only a construct, I now realize the correct picture for that saying. Anyway, I learned today that my dog understands more than I do and that I don’t have to worry about her because she understands what she needs, and she takes care of it on her own and she is happy to do it. She used to be a stray dog out in the country of this desert without sand. I can’t imagine her or other animals out there in the 106-degree heat. I used to like the weather out here because it is so warm, and the winters here are non-existent compared to Colorado where I am from. Some men who work in the oil field took her to a shelter here in town several years ago. She was totally emaciated and dehydrated. She is a yellow lab and shepherd mix according to the shelter. At first, I was worried because yellow labs are very excitable! And shepherds are very strong in their personalities. It takes someone who has great posture and many treats. People have to treat them kindly for them to respect and live with their people. This is my own opinion. People think they are cute as puppies, adopt them, and then put them on leashes to be ‘outside dogs’ even when it is unearthly hot or dangerously cold. My dog Baby graces me with her presence! Anyway, the word construct could be sort of a root word for the word construction. I did not look it up in the dictionary, though. BTW, I know that my dog doesn’t really talk to me!
Imagine being in a room full of people. You are upfront trying to give a speech of some sort, and you can deduce that these people are only thinking about lunch. Maybe they expect you to not know what you are talking about, and they disregard you. Then years later a song on the radio takes them back in time to that instance where they ignored and disregarded that speech. They might realize that they really did not know anything about the subject that you were talking about and so they did not care because it meant nothing to them. They could have built a construction or construct around you in their minds about who you were as a person, so they disregarded you for that reason as well because they decided to personally not like you based off of their construct of you. It helped them to rationalize the reason for their decision to disregard you as a person therefore your speech and vice-versa. What if you were only an image that was projected on stage, a hologram, and you were really speaking from an empty room because you have stage fright. What if someone with technological expertise was able to take your voice and mannerisms and connect them with a different individual’s face, such as someone of a different gender, height, or weight or a different set of clothes. The construction that the audience has of those people will be different based off of who is presenting it. I guess they would say that it is all in the name of business and marketing. The person who listened to the speech says, “If only they had presented this idea using a man! I would have believed in that idea and adopted it!”
Another idea of a construct could be that we only present ourselves in the way people want us to be, and our real selves may never be found because we create a construct that we believe to be more palatable for others.
What about going so far as an idea of a construct being that some people may lead double lives. Like an episode of the ‘Twilight Zone” from the 60’s. Do you think that if a person acts differently with one person over another that they are selling that person their own fake construct? I think that people do this without realizing it. Maybe that is just acting in this case.
Can we go so far as to say that it is a construct or just a different personality that suits the situation that either is thrust upon them or that they have created for themselves?
If you, the person upfront or in that tv commercial, are real, can you be imaginary as well? If you wrote the speech but someone else presented it using that technology, then who is the real person? I guess if you see them then they are there and if they see you then you are real, but who is the hologram that they are using to market their idea?? Which one is the construct? Is it the speech writer and narrator or is it the face that they connected to the message so that it is more of a marketable image. Who decided that it was more marketable? At first thought, it would be society, but societies change all of the time! Look at the movie, The Planet of the Apes. The 1968 version or George Orwell’s book called, Animal Farm.
A second thought for that is that Artificial intelligence or AI is now in control, almost. I learned in my marketing class as well as on other social media platforms that AI is used to track what is popular so that people can market and sell to that group of people. But I have learned also that if the people who work on these social media platforms like you and your product, they will put it out for society to say that it is “popular”, those people also say that AI is in control of that measuring process of popularity, but AI can only measure what it has been given to it to measure. If people decide what is popular in the first place, then AI can only measure the specific information that it is given from those people who may or may not like you and not what was presented originally by everyone. So how does a person market anything based on the true value that society could decide upon if they were given other options? I do not know. So, what is the Purpose of AI?
By Margaret Leora Workman; Warponie Art
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