Black Mirror: The Entire History of You

          In the third episode of the Netflix series Black Mirror, which is appropriately titled, The Entire History of You the majority of people have had a “memory grain” imbedded behind their ears.  The memory grain allows people to re-watch (and hear) everything that they have ever experienced.  The characters are able to relive their experiences through their own eyes where only they can see it, or they can project it onto a television screen and watch it with other people.  Though this device seems as though it would simplify people’s lives significantly, we quickly see that it can also cause some significant problems.

            At the point in time in which the episode takes place, the device is already mainstream, and a everybody but one character has it, and she used to before it got cut out of her against her will.  Having the technology be so domestic has caused the people who have it as part of their day-to-day lives not question it, even though it is in a way, taking a way common skills and privileges.

The general concept of people not having to remember things reminded me of an extreme version of what people say about having smart phones, because we can just look everything up and have spellcheck, so we don’t have to remember proper spelling or grammar either.  It also connects to our omittance of privacy when social media is used to catalog everything we do, or at least the things we choose for people to see.  The selectiveness of social media can also be connected to how the characters on the show can delete memories from their grain, pretending that they never happened.

            Even though people are not thinking about the technology and the effect that it is having on them, it does cause them to think about more details in their life, which may otherwise go unnoticed.  Because the memories are stored and can easily be played back over and over again, people then fixate on small social cues or details to analyze a situation.  We see this occur with the main character, Liam, when he is trying to figure out if his wife, Fi, is having an affair with her ex-boyfriend Jonas.  Liam re-watches moments from the dinner party where he saw first hand Fi and Jonas interacting. He also forced Fi and Jonas to show him memories where they were together and then to delete them.  While watching these memories he fixates on tone of voice, body language, facial expression, distance between he two while their communicating, and how all of that compares to Fi while she’s with Liam, her husband.  Once he confronts his wife and essentially breaks things off with her, he sits and wallows while re-watching happier times they had together.  He drives himself so insane that he ends up cutting out his own grain so he looses all of his memories, the good and the bad.
          I don’t think that I would ever want a device like this if they became available.  I like relying on my own memory and for things that I may not remember super vividly, I almost always have a camera on me, so I can likely rely on home videos and photos.  The show acknowledges hat photos and stories can sometimes alter a memory to not be as accurate as what really happened, and that makes sense for a story, because they may slightly be altered over time, but I don’t necessarily agree for photos.  One of my favorite quotes is “if you want to know what someone fears loosing, watch what they photograph.”  I find this quote to ring extremely true, especially when it comes to memories, because the part of a situation that a person photographs is the part that the person desires to remember the most, so even though the entire scene isn’t captures, the meaningful parts are.

New Media

            Lev Manovich’s The Language of New Media explores what exactly is new media and why.  In the first section of the chapter Manovich explains how we typically define new media by how it is used – for distribution and exhibition, but for some reason, production is left out of this definition.  Specifically Manovich discusses digital video, I assume versus analog, and editing on computer workstations rather than reel-to-reel.  She then went into the four principals of how new media are identified: numerical representation, modularity, automation, and variability.

            They talked about how our new media revolution is so much larger than the previous ones.  So even if defining new media was simple when the term became popular, it is far more complex now, which makes it so much more difficult to define and identify what constitutes “new media.”

            My interest was definitely peaked when they were discussing the different purposes of computers and how what they are used for is sometimes a determining weather or not they are considered new media, specifically when editing on computer workstations was brought up.  The cable station were I work uses Avid editing systems, but people I know who used to volunteer there were there when they were still using reel-to-reel editing, and I always used to hear the “back when I started out….” stories.  That whole transition has a bit of different meaning to me now, because when I started going there, everything was still done on tapes, and now I’m training our volunteers on cameras which all use SD cards.  I can now in a small way understand how much easier I must have had it learning to edit, than my friends even just seven or eight years before me, because I see how much easier SD cards are compared to the tapes with very limited space and glitches in them that we were using when I started out.

The Victorian Internet

          These chapters of The Victorian Internet focused on communication over telegraph. The explore how the telegraph changed communication and relationships, specifically long distance relationships.
          Prior to the invention of the telegraph, letters were likely the main form of long distance communication was letters seeing as the telegraph was invented a few years prior to the invention of the telephone.
         The Victorian Internet explained how the telegraph was used for law enforcement, to further relationships as a tool for people to get to know each other better, and to communicate everyday information and news.
         I found these chapters to be very interesting and surprising similar to how the Internet is used today – which is probably why it’s called “the Victorian internet.”  When they were discussing people getting married through the telegraph, I thought of people who live stream or Skype depending on the situation into a wedding or family event because they could not make it there in person.  Also, just as the internet is seen as at threat to the newspaper industry today, people were concerned that the telegraph would put newspapers out of business, whereas in reality, the telegraph just enabled newspapers to be able to gather more information quickly and efficiantly.

Personal Connections in a Digital Age

            In the first chapter of her book Personal Connections in a Digital Age, Nancy Baym discusses how human relationships have been affected by modern technology.  She explains how face-to-face conversation is becoming increasingly less valued by people who see electronic communication simpler, but she argues that it is taking away from the depth of the conversations.  At the end of the chapter, Baym describes how most electronic messages are seen as “vacuous” and “pointless babble.”  I think that a lot of the issues with electronic communications is that since they aren’t face to face its almost easier for people to be insincere.  When a person doesn’t have to look somebody in the eye and have more than half of a second to formulate a response, they are able to be more calculated.  This can be a really good thing in the sense that people can think about what they’re saying and avoid saying anything they may regret.  At the same time it can also allow for people to misinterpret what is being said, because they can’t see the expression on the other person’s face or hear the tone in their voice.

            Another, and arguably the most recognized, helpful part of electronic communication is the sheer convenience.  When needing to communicate with somebody in a different time zone, or even just need to tell or ask somebody something during a busy day, texting or emailing take much less time than a full phone call which will likely lead to a more extensive conversation.

Martin Heidegger: The Question Concerning Technology

            Martin Heidegger’s first chapter of his book titled The Question Concerning Technology begins to explore what technology is and how it can be appropriately defined (and what those definitions mean).  I must admit I found this reading to be a bit confusing.

            He starts off by explaining that there are two different definitions of the technology, both of which are very different from one another, but both arguable correct.  He starts off by saying that “technology is not equivalent of the essence of technology.” (Heidegger 1)  The two definitions that were discussed are that technology is a human activity, and that technology is a means to an end.   He delves a bit into how both of these characterizations can apply to both older and newer technologies.  I think this is an especially important aspect to look at today seeing as technology is constantly changing and far more advanced than at the time in which Heidegger wrote this.

            Later on in the chapter, Heidegger introduced the idea that there is/could be negative consequences of technology, and that technology may become so advanced that it could surpass our ability to fully control it or how it is used.

            For me, I took these ideas and tried to apply it to something like social media.  Social media can be both a means to an end and a human activity in itself.  When trying to look at the negative aspect of technology getting out of control not in the sense that it will physically be out of our control or controlling us, but more in the psychological sense.    Social media can be extraordinarily beneficial to society, and can be a fun way to waist time, and I would argue perfectly harmless to the majority of our society.  However, there are people who can get overly attached and even addicted to social media and the Internet in general.  In these cases, social media (or what ever technology may be applicable in individual situations) is controlling its user, because they are no longer thinking about the world happening directly around them, and only the world that lives on their social media profiles.  As I mentioned before, this is not the case for all, and I would say this is not the case for the vast majority of people.   I think most people can enjoy social media and the internet for entertainment and use it critically for important information without letting it run their lives, but it is still important to recognize the influence that it is able to have.

Black Mirror: Episode 1

               In watching the first twenty minutes of the first episode of the Netflix series Black Mirror, we see the Prime Minister Michael Callow (played by Rory Kinnear) awoken with an alarming phone call.  He is then shown a disturbing video of Princess Susannah, the Duchess of Beaumont who has been kidnapped reading a message from her captors demanding that Callow have sexual relations with a pig on live television, streamed across all major British networks that evening.  If he complies with this demand and all of the conditions that go along with it, they are promised the princess’ safe return, and if not the threaten to execute her that night.  The government desperately attempted to stop the public from finding out about the situation, it was too late.  The video had been uploaded to YouTube, so many people had already seen it.  A voluntary D-Notice was put in place to stop new channels from covering the story in the UK, but after international outlets were reporting on it, local channels had to in order to stay current.

            All of the different technology being used in this episode has a continuous impact on all of the characters, because of how endless the stream of people’s reactions and input on the situation is.  First off, the video was uploaded to YouTube, allowing virtually anybody to see it with just a few clicks.  It also made it very easily shareable.  So we then saw reactions to the video through the comments on YouTube and on Twitter, both of which allowed people to add their own twist to the story and to share their opinions.  This constant influx of other peoples opinions and comments made the already devastating situation even more difficult because it makes the crisis inescapable even for a moment.  We can especially see how all of the comments effect the Prime Ministers wife, when she confronts him about how humiliated she is, and how everybody throwing in their two cents is clearly making it worse on her, because he is grappling with how people will view her and her family no matter what the outcome of the situation is.  Since the news stations all wanted to have a unique piece to their coverage of this topic, there were polls and statistics gathered based on how the public was responding.  This offered a small (like very small) strange sense of comfort for Prime Minister Michael Callow, because the results showed that the majority of the population were sympathetic towards him, so he was able to be reassured that what was happening was in no way his fault.  The government was also able to use technology to attempt to trace the source of the video’s upload.

            I think that given the situation they were in, there isn’t a whole lot that the characters could have done differently that would have drastically changed the outcome, but I think there are little things that could have made it easier on the characters themselves. Given the opportunity, it would have been ideal if the government could have released only the parts of the story that they wanted to, but since the video was already on YouTube in its entirety, that would have been impossible.  The Prime Minister’s wife could have tried to avoid the Internet for the day so she wouldn’t know what people were saying which clearly amplified the stress of the situation.  The government employees needed to have access to the internet so they could keep up with the story, but ideally it would have been limited so their information and response to the situation could be kept confidential as long as necessary.  We saw one of the government employees conversing secretly over text message with one woman who worked for the new station.  I think having people preemptively leak information like that causes attention to be on areas of the story where it shouldn’t be, preventing the government to do what they need to in order to get the princess back.  
          This episode of Black Mirror was done in a very dystopian view, especially involving technology.  I think if it was made from a utopian perspective, this situation would have never occurred, but then there wouldn’t have been a show.  So I think given the situation, the characters would have been able to control the story more and defeat the kidnappers without any setbacks, like the princess potentially loosing a finger.  I think the main difference would be that the characters would have been in control, and not been being controlled.

Marshal McLuhan "The Medium is the Message"

           In the first chapter, Medium is the Message of Marshal McCluhan’s 1964 book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, McLuhan delves into how the medium in which information is shared in itself is a huge piece of the message that is being conveyed through it.  An important example that McLuhan references is how electric light in it self has no content or intended meaning, but when it is used to display a logo, or a company/organization’s name it changes how people perceive the words or graphics they are looking at compared to if they saw the exact same graphics in a news paper or a magazine. 
            I agree with McLuhan in that the medium definitely plays a role in how the content is viewed, especially because with each new technology, comes new opportunities (as well as new boundaries).  For example, in addition to the medium itself being different, the use of light also adds more options to how something is displayed, whether it be color, size, brightness, change of color or brightness, or many more factors, which could all be factors in altering how viewers perceive the message.  As McLuhan recognized that “many people would be disposed to say that it was not the machine, but what one did with the machine, that was its meaning or message.” I agree with that one level, because as McLuhan mentioned, a light bulb itself doesn’t have any inherent meaning.  However I feel like even thought the light bulb itself doesn’t have a meaning, the people involved in marketing and advertising certainly know that their sign lit up over a city at night is going to carry a different feel than a sandwich board in front of their businesses door during the day, and they use those vastly different mediums to their advantage, depending on what message or product they are trying to sell.