1. Throughout this excerpt, Sobchack refers to a sense of duty, "ethical responsibility" (136) or "ethical investment" (140). She argues that each technological advance -photography, cinema, and electronic- changes the "norms of ... ethical investment" (140). She says that "As our aesthetic forms and representation s of 'reality' become externally realized and then unsettled first by photography, then cinema, and now electronic media, our values and evaluative criteria of what counts in our lives are also unsettled and transformed" (136). In other words, as technology advances, representations of reality externalize our perceptions of it more and more and this breaks down our sense of ethics. Military training seems to be a good example of this. First, there were shooting ranges where you shoot a picture of someone, not a real person. Technology has advanced to the point where soldiers are being trained to shoot using video-games like Doom or virtual simulations that simulate them dropping a bomb over a building. But in these technological mediums, there seem to be no real consequences except you use up your life points, "game over," or "mission accomplished." They do not see real blood or the families that grieve over a lost relative. It seems that as these technological intermediates overlap more and more representations of reality, the connection between a person and reality and its consequences become weaker and so does his/her sense of ethics. Perhaps this correlation is not a coincidence but rather reveals that in the real world there is an unchangeable moral standard or "ethical responsibility" which exists like the body but through cultural values and technology, its representation is different but this representation is not reality.

2. Sobchack refers to Chris Marker's film La Jetee and uses it to demonstrate the difference between photographs -"moment" (144)- and cinema -"lived momentum" (145). In the film, still photographs of a woman are shown and Sobchack describes it as seeming to only see a figure in memory: "frozen and re-membered moments that mark her loss as much as her presence" (145). From this paragraph it seems to imply that this woman is no longer with the hero, that in reality she is not there but her presence remains through the photograph, keeping her from completely vanishing. But then she "suddenly blinks" as the "increasingly rapid cinematic succession of stilled and dissolving photographic images of her" (145) approach motion and subtly achieve it and "the image becomes 'fleshed out,' and the woman turns from a posed odalisque into someone who is not merely an immortalized lost object of desire but also -and more so- a mortal and desiring subject" (146). Isn't this "increasingly rapid cinematic succession of stilled and dissolving" the same as the increasing reduction of the interval? At this point where the intervals are so small we perceive the representation of movement and the woman appears to regain a degree of substance or "flesh" as "we and the image are reoriented in relation to each other. the space between the camera's (and the spectators) gaze and the woman becomes suddenly inhabitable" (146). It appears that the woman may have vanished completely had it not been for the photograph that preserves the memory of her, making the photograph the point between her presence and her nonexistence, like a vanishing point where something of substance passes out of existence. But by rapidly succeeding these photographs or vanishing points, we bridge the space inbetween and seem to have a direct experience with her. It's interesting that traditionally a body must move towards a vanishing (along a z-axis) watching the image in the distance get closer and closer before being able to stand in direct relationship with it in the real world, but this film seems to propose that rapidly succeeding representations of vanishing points bring it from a removed distance to an involved, relational and intimate experience perhaps like the way reading brings an experience to a reader. Each word has a presence as it has a definition and purpose (verb or adjective), but alone it does not mean much; it simply exists like the woman in the photograph. But place a word after it and a word after that, each word its own vanishing point, and eventually a sentence forms and with it meaning and experience for the reader. As shrinking spaces between words to a critical size lets readers cross the time and distance separating the reader from the author, so does shrinking the interval between successive still photographs let viewers cross the time and distance (the z-axis) which is the removal of the third dimension that separates the viewer from the person using the camera.

3. I noticed that Sobchack spells "remembered" with a hyphen as "re-membered" (145). It seems appropriate to spell it this way emphasizing the "re" as if to imply the revers of "dismembered," suggesting that through the photograph she loses substance because she's dismembered of her body but can be "re-membered" in photograph, although not to the real her. In the same way electronics like a television might "atomize" (155) or dismember information of a whole, like an image, into pieces like electrons or pixels, and disperse it
across a system like the television screen to re-member it into a 2-D image. As electronics today accomplish this process with abstract things like image and information the negative consequences we may encounter are a noisy image or mistranslation. What consequences might occur if electronics atomize a living body to the effect of, in reality, accomplishing the "suddenly inhabitable"? The Fly is a movie in which such a scenario is presented. Jeff Goldblum is a scientist working on teleporting objects. The machine he invented essentially takes the object or material, analyzes it, atomizes it, passes it to the destination pod, and then "re-members" it there. for things like metal and paper the process works successfully, but when he put a baboon in it, the baboon came out the destination pod inside out. Later he realizes this occurs because the machine is interpreting the object's makeup insufficiently and demonstrates this by putting in a steak and observing that the steak after teleportation is artificial. It seems that to "re-member" something is to produce something like the original but actually a fake representation that falls short of the original. Then he understands this mistake occurred because he didn't teach the machine to recognize living tissue. So the machine's ability to re-member the steak was limited because it could only re-member the steak based on what it knows which is controlled by the scientist. Later Goldblum himself goes into the pod but there is a fly in the pod also so that when he comes out the other pod, his and the fly's bodily molecules are mixed and several problems arise. It follows that electronic capabilities are subject to what humans teach them to do. Therefore, it appears logical that since humans are often incapable of remembering things objectively and accurately, that electronic should be incapable also, resulting in the diminishing of reality.