As we close out the fourth week of the semester what I took away from this week after viewing all the material is that social media and technology is allowing people to become whatever and whoever they want. This week’s episode of Black Mirror “Be Right Back”, the article on socialmediatoday by Laura Johnson and the youtube video describing the application Replika all showed me this common theme for the week.
“Be Right Back” the first episode of the second season of Black Mirror was another thrilling episode. I did realize that in this series the episodes do start off slow to build the plot, but once the plot is built the episodes have shown to be very interesting and thrilling. So to get started on the episode it begins with a happy couple named Ash and Martha. The episode makes it known that Ash is a delivery driver and Martha is an artist. One day Ash has to make a delivery and Martha does not tag along because she wants to work on a new piece she began. As day becomes night Martha does not hear from Ash and she later learns he passed away during this delivery. Martha is destroyed by this because it is made clear Ash was her soulmate. At his funeral Martha encounters a friend and she shows Martha an application for their smartphone that could help her with her loss. After not wanting to try out the application Martha gives in because she is pregnant and all alone. Martha falls in love with this new program and when she drops her phone one day and cannot speak to this fake Ash she melts down. This makes her come to the realization that speaking on the phone is just not enough. This escalates to her buying a replica of Ash. She now has an addiction that cannot be helped because she misses her partner they were meant for each other. When she realizes that this replica of Ash is not the same she breakdown and almost has it commit suicide. In the end she keeps it in the attic which goes back to the beginning of the episode when Ash was telling Martha about his mother not being able to deal with the death of his brother and stored all his belongings in the attic. This foreshadowed Ash’s faith. Technology is a scary thing. It allows people and things to be something they are not as shown in this episode. Although this replica looked like and sounded like Ash it was not him. It did not have all the things that brought them together the flaws and perfections.
Second is the article by Laura Johnson. The article gives us the differences between social networks and online communities. Although the intentions of both of these categories are for the common good there is some negative things about both of them. I know the article speaks on the perks and good uses of the two, but there is more than just that. It is allowing people to be something they are not on social media. In social networks you can already know somebody and their feed could be completely the opposite of what you know them as. People can post anything and deceive anyone. In online communities this deception can be brought from just sharing the same interest as another. These things are possibly, but there is good brought out from this as well. You can connect to new people and connect with people outside of where you met. In the end there is pros and cons to this just like with the episode for the week. It was painful for Martha to be with this fake artificial Ash, but it still helped her cope with losing her partner.
The youtube video on the program Replika shows ties into both the episode and the article. Replika is a chatbot that creates a digital representation of whatever you want it to be. In the video talks about how Eugenia Kyuda started an early form of Replika by developing a chatbot where she uploaded all her message history with her friend into a network where it created a bot she could interact with in the form of her. This is very similar to how Martha started off in this week’s episode. So after everything we viewed and read for the week it left me with some questions. Is technology going to far? Sooner or later are we going to create something we cannot control?
The weekly news article I chose was the new sexual assault allegation against Donald Trump. Amy Dorris a former model stated that back in the 90s Trump sexual assaulted her during the US Open tennis tournament. I felt that this was relevant as a weekly news post because with the presidential election right around the corner we have to sit back and make sure that with everything going on right now is this who we really want in the office leading us for another four years. A man who has multiply allegations of assaulting women and from my last week’s news post basically the reason why we are still in the midst of a pandemic?
SOCIAL MEDIA & SOCIETY 