While reading the article on Thomas Edison’s spirit phone, I came to a realization; humans are obsessed with death. Death is the one certainty we all can agree on but it is also the thing we know virtually nothing about. We seek out the dead to gain clues about the afterlife and to get reassurance that it’s not so bad on the other side. In today’s world we use mediums, ouija boards, digital versions of ourselves, seances, etc… to reach the dead.
This article proves that we’ve had this obsession during Edison’s time as well. Even Edison was curious about the afterlife and believed that he could contact the dead with his “spirit phone.” With the rapid growth of technology Edison, like everyone else, got confident and felt that they were closer to reaching immortality; that they could finally cheat death.
I think at the core of all of these methods to contact the dead is a desire to achieve immortality. We contact the dead to gain clues about the afterlife and even though we’re curious about what comes next we also fear what comes next. Fear is stronger than our curiosity. What we really seek is immortality. We fear death and what comes next and constantly seek ways to subvert it; even if we only achieve that immortaltiy through the digital world. In the modern world we are further removed from death than in Edison’s time so as we continue to advance technologically we will continue to seek immortality until the day we die.