This week contents include some of the material which will definitely forces a person to sit and think about. This week’s Black Mirror episode “Be Right Back”, the readings like Social Network vs. Online Community and an introduction to Replika AI. All of these things seemed interesting yet persuade me to think deep.

Starting from the episode Black Mirror: Be Right Back, now they introduce a new character named Martha who recently become a widow and then she started using an online service which allow a person to communicate with your departed partners. At first this thing seemed to be a relief from the grief but eventually it turned out that there is a lot of difference between a person and a robot. But I personally found this thing depressing even after hearing the concept of such a thing. I mean you know that a person is not alive, how can you still wish to have them back in any form? This seems scary yet psychic to me. What are your comments on it?

The article “Social Network vs. Online Community” was an informative piece and it clearly explains the actual difference between social network and online community. There two terms are as different as the virtual and real world. Social Networks include the people with whom we have personal relations or we meet daily like our colleagues, family members or even our friends. So, every person with whom we have a relation in the real world comes in our social network. While Online Community includes the people or group of people who meet online for some specific reason or purpose. We have the virtual contacts with them because we share the same reason, interest which bring us to the online community, or our intentions and purposes are same.

So, I think these two are as different as the real and the virtual world. A person is now living two different lives, he/she is having a real life in the physical world and then he/she go to the virtual world and find people online who are not less than a ghost sometimes. What do you think about the online life?

From this online life, now I will talk about the new technology that I have been introduced with for the very first time i.e. Replika which is a text based AI. People use this app when they find it hard to share something with their close friends and relatives. Again my question is why are we striving to find the problems of our situations in the technology? Why do we find it easy to talk to a reboot than to a human being? I wanted to ask you all what made this difficult for you to share your problems with your close one? If I talk about myself, I think in the hours of depression what a person need is a self-care, I repeat “Self-care”. So, when I feel depress or feel no connection with people, I use to get some “Me time” or in other words some alone time with any activity which can relax my mind and my body. Tell me about yours? What will you do in the hours of depression? Will you prefer to have a “Me time” or will you go for a “Reboot chat”.

For this week’s news article, I have found this article quite interesting and helpful in understanding that technology is not an escape from the pain we feel. We have to bear the pain or pass over it, these are the only options by which we can move forward in our lives.

Link: https://medium.com/s/technically-dead/in-the-wake-technology-is-changing-the-way-we-mourn-df8ba72135ee  

In this week’s material that is been given to read, listen and watch. The main focus of the material I have seen is on the topic that what social media is doing to human life. Every passing day, month or year is bringing new and interesting apps on the social media platform and taking us away from the real life.

This week’s episode of the Black Mirror: 15 Million Merits, in this episode we all see how Bing met with Abi and convinces her to participate in the talent show and how this lead this girl to loss her dignity. I mean we crave to have fame and limelight but while perusing we fail to understand that everything comes with a price.

in the article: “Cicero’s Twitter: Tom Standage on the forgotten history of social media”, the author said that humans from the start have the habit of communicating in a very private form. Social media has given us nothing more than just more room to communicate with a lot of people but still we use the chat boxes to have our deep conversations. He said “The central premise of the book is that from Cicero to Thomas Paine to Mark Zuckerberg, people have always communicated in very personal ways. Yet we often hear people talking about “social media” as an entirely new phenomenon. Why is it so easy for people to forget this history?”

I think the author has said right about this phenomenon. People when come to sharing do not trust easily and still find ways to share in a more private way. Social media has given us nothing more than that.

After this I have read the article: “How the Loss of the Landline Is Changing Family Life”. I found the topic of this article interesting to know what impacts social media has put to the family as a whole. We often see people saying that now every person of the house has his/her own cellphones and that’s why they do not have a landline communication. I mean while saying so, they still did not see what these cellphones have charged them with the price? The price of their “Family time”. Landlines were used to be a common sharing place for the families and the whole family gather at the landline spot to talk with their loved one. What the cellphones have done is that they have taken this family time and replaced it with the virtual rooms and chatting groups where the same family members are connecting virtually from their own rooms.

From all these readings and watching, what I found is we are being indulged so much in the social media that we forgot our actual life, our family time and our me time too. The social media’s addiction is so powerful that we do not find it easy to stop scrolling and turn the Wi-Fi off to relax our eyes. My question to all of you is

Does the social media is that much powerful or we made it so?

Who gave this power to social media? US?

I have found this article related to this week’s topic that social media is improving or in other words empowering itself in order to grab more of our time.

Link: https://www.falcon.io/insights-hub/industry-updates/social-media-updates/5-social-media-news-stories/

With all of the contents for this week blog. I have passed through a phase when I felt what are we doing with our lives? I must say that these articles and the movie chapter was all acted as an eye opener for me.

In the Black Mirror: The Entire History of You, Liam has taken a chip in his neck and then he had to pass through a very painful procedure. But what does that chip do? It helps a person to memorize every person and even the scene in his mind. And he can look back on it whenever he wants or if anybody else wants to. What lesson we get from this, again how technology is playing an important role in our lives that I think we are really going to depend on technology to remember our memories for us. I think that depending a lot on technology is taking us away from the real world. I know many of you would disagree with me. But let just suppose, for the upcoming years aren’t we going to remember our loved ones by ourselves? Rather we have to use chips to save our memories now?

Technology is playing its role in our daily lives. Now it depends upon us that in which way we want this technology to lead us to. The two of the articles with a contradict titles i.e. “Is Google Making Us Stupid” and “Google Is Not Making You Stupid”. Again it depends upon the people, how they want to take this technology as. I mean many of us would agree that yes we spend a lot of time on google and whenever we make a search we divert from the main task and start surfing for unwanted materials. Although, google has helped us a lot in many ways. But my point here is that google takes a lot of time of a person and again a person would eventually end up being in the world of internet.

I have found this article “Foucault and social media: life in a virtual panopticon” really interesting. In this article, the author has talked on various aspects that how we ended up being in the social media and away from our real world life. He said: “A Foucaultian perspective on social media targets the mechanism that makes it tick: sharing. Sharing is basic to social media. Sharing content is not just a neutral exchange of information, however”. I totally agree with his point here that sharing is the basic tool on social media. And I personally do not like to share my personal life on social media because it brings a lot of problems in our lives. Sharing your data is like giving access to other people on the social media to your life and they can use the data in any form, which I personally not in favor of.

So, my question to you all is Do you want others to lead you? Do you want to give them access to your personal life?

Consider it before it’s too late to Reconsider!

The link is being shared which is highlighting some negative effects of technology.

Links: https://www.businessinsider.com/technology-negative-bad-effects-society-2019-8#:~:text=Experts%20have%20found%20that%20in,and%20increased%20anxiety%20and%20depression.

Hi everybody

this is rayan i’m in the second semester in alfred university i came from saudi arab Born and raised jeddah city to be specific the second biggest city in saudi and I consider myself sport guy i love playing soccer and i play ping pong and i actually have win a trophy in ping pong tournament back home .

Thank-Q