No Tray For These Ashes

How much of our lives have become merely the instances of what we leave via voicemail, text-message, and/or social media? How many of us actually meet the criterion of our digital selves these days?  As technology continues to grow and communication continues to become more and more mediated, do our personalities become more constructed, more uncanny? 

With the advantage of anonymity, people have time to carefully construct their responses to portray a certain self-image and exploit the unfamiliar. The episode “Be Right Back” highlights the inadequacies of technology and how it tries to personify the highly complex, fractured, and fluid nature of the human self. Living more and more online, we, as people, creep closer and closer to the edge that demarcates our fundamental perceptions. Technology is both amazing and frightening and this episode takes all of those realities and constructs them into one story, but still demonstrates how something that fills a void on the surface does not have the depth to truly fill the void of a loss and, simply, that technology cannot fully replicate reality. Technology can bridge many gaps, but it cannot bridge the gap for our notions of truth, reality, existence, and humanity itself as demonstrated in the “Be Right Back” episode. This episode could easily be perceived as totally bonkers until one remembers that the mourning of someone actually does influence these kinds of drastic means and actions. Grief makes us do crazy things, things we could never imagine ourselves doing outside of a grieving period. It attempts to deflect our attention from the truth, but there are always points of rupture, where the fabric of the digital age is torn and the lines are completely blurred.

I, personally, would be creeped out by a human clone of anyone, so a human replica of a loved one of mine would not help me fill the void of losing them if I was grieving, especially, if the replica was based solely upon social media and their digital selves. I believe it would make the mourning much harder, honestly. One could even equate this scenario to being in an unhealthy relationship that’s hanging on by a thread that the two have been stringing each other along with rather than just coming to terms with the reality of the situation. That kind of situation is not beneficial to anyone, but just as love blinds us, grief does as well.