This week I listened to a podcast called Note to self and the subject that they talked about this week was seeing ourselves inside the Black Mirror episodes that we’ve been watching this semester. As I listened to this even from the start of the podcast it was very interesting. In the beginning they talked about how in the one episode you can talk to your loved ones after they died and that we actually have this technology today. For example there’s this mother of three named Ginger and she has terminal cancer, but she going to be using a new service that lets her communicate with her kids on her behalf after she likely dies in the future. When I heard this in the podcast I was so freaked out that we actually had this technology. I am actually really interested in how many people might actually use it to help them cope with a loss too. It can be a very helpful product. But I definitely don’t want to see the full life models like in the episode, that would be very very creepy.

Then on the podcast they talked to the creators go the episodes and got there take on how they make them and its actually very interesting. They basically think about a topic and say oh what id this happened or what if this happened. Both writers come at it at a more laughable view of just how ridiculous some of the topics are but at the end if the one writer is laughing at the consequences of the episode and another is truly terrified, then they know they did a good job with it. And I completely agree. For most of the episodes im literally like oh my gosh this is so ridiculous, but then you get into it and are like oh man the consequences man. S I understand where they come from while writing these types of episodes.

After that they talked about and I found absolutely insane that the one ratings episode is actually happening in China!!! I found this absolutely insane. Im not sure to what extent its being done or how this system particularly works, but its happening.

They then went on to talk about more real world implications from the black mirror episodes. They said that all of the episodes are basically a worst case scenario foreach in particular topic that they choose. One of the things that Note to Self has been telling its viewers to do is actually put a sticky note over your camera on your laptop. As weird as that sounds, in the episode called “Shut up and dance”, a kid was filmed after visiting a website that had some kind of virus that attached itself to his computer and the person could literally see everything on the laptops camera. This actually could happen in the real world and should make people do this with their computers too. I think im actually going to start doing this just to play it safe.

What other episodes do you think can come into the real world?

Weekly news: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/02/us/politics/trump-covid.html