So I literally just joined two online Facebook “community group pages” less than a month ago, ‘Grey’s Anatomy Humor’ and ‘Wild About Raccoons’ (I’m a simple soul). I love them both, I love seeing the endless Grey’s related things(that I’m crying at most of the time, if you know you know) and cute little raccoons. I think for me personally, they’re still like social media. I was referred by a friend to each one, and I very rarely post in either of them. They’re decent sized groups, Grey’s with just shy of 250,000 members and Wild About Raccoons has about 19,000. I posted an art project I did before school started (below, guess which one I posted it to) and I still get notifications about it, easily probably 500 people interacted with the post in about a day and I’m super anal with notifications and it was too much for me from my normal 3 notifications a day being tagged in something by one of two people. Honestly I thought this was as far as community pages went, I thought it was interacting on a main stream social media site but in like closed group. I really didn’t know they have specialized forum pages for different hobbies. I might check into it.
I might check into the Replika thing too, I’ve been thinking about it for days but I don’t want to spin myself out of control. I’ve always believed in talking things through and leading yourself to find your root issues, but I feel like this would be something to too easily get attached too. Im pretty self aware at this point and know most of my limits, but I don’t think I’d be able to separate it from being a tool, to blurring the lines of reality or not. I’m really excited to read and see how the rest of y’all look at this, the entire concept is wild. It seems like the type of thing that can either go really well, and help someone work through themselves, or it can completely destroy someone with too much dependency. I don’t think there’s just a ‘happy medium’ ‘I can walk away at any time’ vibe coming from this type of thing.
There’s definitely no ‘happy medium’ in the Black Mirror episode this week. I’ve dealt with so much death, and so much loss, and I would do anything to have one more conversation with almost any of them. But this…this is just too far. I remember in March, I was driving back home from South Carolina and we stopped at a Cracker Barrel. It seemed like a normal day, but I still think about it often. My dad died when I was 17, it was unexpected, and a whole mess in general. I still haven’t fully recovered or accepted it. But on this day, in this random ass Cracker Barrel, I stopped breathing, only for a moment, but I stopped. All because I caught eyes with a guy who I swear could be my fathers doppelgänger. It threw me off, sent me on a downhill spiral. I stared at him the entire lunch, I didn’t talk to my best friend I was with, I couldn’t do anything, I just froze. Looking back I think I overreacted, but the point is, if i overreacted at this, imagine if I an uploaded ‘real’ person showed up one day. I genuinley think I would be mortified and shit myself, and not nearly as excited.
SOCIAL MEDIA & SOCIETY 
I think that there is a point, or a certain line that you just cannot entertain crossing. Once you do, you’ve entered into a something entirely “unhuman.” As tempting as it is to bring our loved ones back, you could never create new experiences and memories. You wouldn’t want to tarnish or minimize the memories that have already been imprinted on you. You would want to remember the good times and not be burdened by something that is not truly representational of our loved ones. At first, I understood why Martha used her and Ash’s text messages and communicating with “AI Ash” to work through her emotions and get her feelings out. I thought that it could be a way of mentally processing everything and working through her grief. In that respect, I understood having the opportunity to say the things that could not be said. I think it is the same reason why we visit graves and speak to our loved ones occasionally. But when she continued speaking to it and then eventually ordered the body, it became an entirely different and unhealthy situation.
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I totally agree with your take on how it is just too far to do something like that to just have one more conversation with that loved one. It is very interesting to see that your experience was like that with the Facebook community and I was very surprised to see how many people were in that group, and how many people saw your post. Overall I really enjoyed the blog!
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