The biggest thing that really stuck with me this week was not any of the readings, videos, or podcasts. It was the thinking that was brought about after dissecting all of this material together.The realization of the world that I live in today and the realization that it’s probably affecting everyone, including myself, more than we’re willing to admit.
The biggest ideas we reflected on this week were our memories and our dependence on social media/technology. Let’s look at The Entire History of You first :
The obsession that Liam starts to have with memories and the events that occur throughout the episode are pretty good reflections of the relationships that we have with our phones and social media. Comparing this episode with the feelings that students had in the article on MIT Technology Review offers some insight. When this professor asks his students to turn in their cell phones, they describe feelings of being “weird or something”, that their phones may be “depriving them of their relationship to the world”, or feelings of real work and world engagement once the cell phones were gone.If you remember from the Black Mirror episode, all of these ideas were present; for example, the feelings of “being weird”. When the characters are at a dinner party, they begin discussing how everyone should have the memory device, and when one of the women states that she had it removed, everyone is astonished at the fact that she can live without it. They begin ranting about how flawed our brains are when it comes to memory. This matches the feeling that someone had after asking for the time. People were looking at her funny as if saying, “You don’t have a cell phone?”.
We also have the instance where Liam begins depriving himself of the real world once things with his girlfriend don’t work out. Rather than looking around at the life he still has left, he is constantly looking back at his memories to blind himself from what’s actually going on around him. He replays thoughts of what he had woken up to in the past, what his house had looked like before, etc. Although this may seem extremely sad when watching the show from that perspective, this is what we do on a smaller scale when looking at the world through our cell phones day in and day out.
Lastly, we have the realization that in some instances, we are better off and can focus more effectively once these distractions are removed. After removing the device, Liam and the girl at the dinner party are no longer hindered by exact replays of the things that happened in their life. The students who no longer had their phones were no longer hindered by constant buzzing, texts, notifications, and so on.
If everyone takes a moment and looks into their own social media/cell phone usage, they will probably see the same themes, especially for those in my generation. Everyone has let their social media feed or a notification get in the way of a conversation, homework, etc. Everyone has had a Facebook or Snapchat account remind them of a memory from years ago that brought them back to a place or people that they wish they hadn’t been around. There have been times where I have had to shut off my phone to do homework or leave it behind so that I could enjoy myself without the constant distractions. I have also seen the things that are said or done on social media ruin relationships.
Cell phones and social media are not all bad. But when you find yourself over indulging, remember the lessons that we learned this week. My question for everyone is: Do the useful aspects of social media and technology outweigh the bad? And do you think there’s a way that we could give people access to the good without being susceptible to these flaws?
Here’s a short video about a couple who got rid of their cell phones and the cost benefits, just to offer a different perspective.
WEEKLY NEWS
Here is an article about a small college, about the same size as Alfred University, who is currently battling COVID-19 in the only way that they now can, due to outbreaks. I’m sharing this article in order to stress the importance of following guidelines and the real world consequences if guidelines are not followed from the get-go.
SOCIAL MEDIA & SOCIETY 
I think the useful aspects of social media and technology are outweighed by the bad because of the severity of the bad. Social media and technology is very useful for communication and being able to add to your skill set, but when you look at the importance it has become to people it has to severity to ruin ones life. One mistake or lapse of judgment in a moment in someones life does not go away. I also feel there is no way to give people just access to the good. There is always pros and cons to something and people are going to have to just have to either deal with the cons or feel it is not that important and there is more to life.
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