Author: darunck
Exchange of Death with Autonomous Vehicles
Something I briefly brought up in class is agency in vehicle related deaths and how it changes with autonomous driving cars. I will acknowledge that ultimately people are expected to pay attention and be accountable for the car while the auto-pilot is on, however the action is still the vehicle killing a human (the vehicle accelerating itself into a tractor trailer killing the driver). Most vehicle deaths currently feature the vehicle as the tool or medium in which a person was killed by another person. How would opinions on driving change if a hypothetical 10,000 deaths from drunk drivers were prevented while 1,000 new deaths are caused by glitches in the vehicle itself?
One thing that I think is worth considering is the nature of vehicle deaths. If a function similar to the activity we did in class was ever implemented is it really ethical to kill an obese old woman legally going through a crosswalk if it saves a family of four in the vehicle? Perhaps the death toll is reduced to a quarter of what it would have been otherwise but is forcing someone who did nothing incriminating to bear the burden of the family that did not have their vehicle in proper condition the proper action? Since it is their property, the vehicle, along with all its failures, should in be their burden. Ultimately the value of a life is put on a scale against other life in a way that we do not currently have to face.
While these are serious issues that I think are worth contemplating I do believe that successful auto-piloting would be a great addition for a society where so much death is caused with vehicles, namely drunk and texting driving deaths.
Daniel Runck Haunted Media
Artist’s Statement
My project is designed to try and target several of the lines that we associate with the grieving process. I intentionally attempt to make both characters unlikable and rather devoid of development in order to focus on and isolate their actions and desires. Isolating these actions focuses on the grieving process and the ways in which they can be healthy, unhealthy, or have negative impacts on others. Another way this is accomplished is through the lack of names, and partial dependence on lower connotation names such as Old Man and Boy despite being family. The use of a Twine word-based game allows people to interact with the process and be as linear or nonlinear as I would like while not limiting the things I wish to accomplish. While there are things that I may have liked to flesh out more such as the game aspect, being able to create win/loss scenarios, I do believe the Twine project functions well as an interactive narrative.
While my personal experiences are not something this work is dependent on they are large influences. There is an individual in my family that likes editing old photos of lost loved ones and that is something that is hard for me to watch, even if someone may have wanted their life to be something other than it was it still seems like a rather large line is being crossed. Actions that alter the memory of one’s life, to me, are something that should not be part of a healthy grieving process. I do recognize that others have their own grieving processes and to them may make sense. While the character is rather apathetic about performing such actions, it is important to understand that I attempted to write the character as someone who is not a good person.
There are several kinds of haunting that I could have implemented in place of a spirit being bound to an object, such as a possession of a human, a ghost that manifests as a shadow of the former self, and a manifestation of the grandson’s imagination that only feels like a paranormal activity for instance. By binding the spirit of the grandfather to a piece of technology the relationship between technology and death is tightened, even if this is narratively separate from the intersection that exists in online memorials. In our age this interaction is closed all the time as physical newspaper obituaries are less common and livestreaming funerals becomes more prevalent.
The grandfather never becomes immortal but by ‘surviving’ his own death he has achieved a similar situation to the CEO mentioned by Hossein Rahnama[1] in that he Is bound to technology and that he is incapable of being more than he was in life. One of the things that is frustrating to me about the situation with Mr. Rahnama is that as a program his ‘immortalization’ is generated from records that can recreate an observed sequence and will never be able to replicate a fresh human experience. Similarly, the grandfather is bound to a phone, and has stopped accumulating experiences as a human. The grandfather, like a program generated from old memories, after his grandson goes out of his way for him so that he may pass the spirit is still devoid of empathy and feels no new emotion when encountering a different experience. Additionally, it is revealed that the grandfather has no true desire to live beyond his mortal life, but simply guessed that was what he’d want. I think that many people who would want some recording of who they were to survive them may not consider that allowing someone, and yourself, to pass is something natural and a part of death.
Another line that I tried to identify is the amount of acceptable apathy associate with the grieving process. Walter discusses the ideas of Geoffery Gorer in his Death, Grief, and Mourning in Contemporary Britain [2]and the idea of the pornography of death, meaning that societies that do not talk about death will become obsessed with things surrounding it. While the ideas are old, published in 1965, the concept that without rituals to address death people can develop psychological problems[3] I think can still apply as the modern grieving ritual is much more visible and social. No longer is mourning a private ritual, as the expectation is often a public expression of grief, be it a Facebook post or social media tribute. For example, rather than visiting his gravestone the friends of a now deceased Facebook friend will often post something to his page on Facebook along with a message. The narrative can push the reader into a situation where they are choosing between two different ways of messing with that ritual in order to increase social presence. While not explicitly obvious while playing of these options one is the best, and results in more people visiting the memorial site, objectively fulfilling the task better.
While the primary reason for creating self-serving characters was more plot based, I also like the idea that It can generate a sense eeriness. As their relationship is defined by their lack of contact it may have been easy to put a non-family member as the haunting figure, but by the “failure of presence”[4] of the total lack of anything that bound them together other than circumstance. Two of three possible endings involve the phone the spirit inhabits getting destroyed and the main character has absolutely no idea whether or not the spirit has peacefully passed on provided they do not fully trust the psychic. The other ending is completely open with no sort of concluding thoughts other than the grandfather is now gone. I attempt to leave out many familiar and expected narrative functions such as development of characters and any kind of fulfilling conclusion, which partially enables the characters to simply be the self-serving jerks that I see in some actions taken in the real world.
[1] Humphries, Courtney. “Digital Immortality: How Your Life’s Data Means a Version of You Could Live Forever.” MIT Technology Review. October 30, 2018. Accessed March 28, 2019. https://www.technologyreview.com/s/612257/digital-version-after-death/.
[2] Walter, Tony. “MODERN DEATH: TABOO OR NOT TABOO?” Sociology 25, no. 2 (1991): 295. http://www.jstor.org/stable/42857623.
[3] Gorer, Geoffrey. Death, Grief, and Mourning in Contemporary Britain. Salem, NH: Ayer., 1965.
[4] Fisher, Mark. 2016. The Weird and the Eerie. A Repeater Books paperback original. London: Repeater Books.
Social Media Lost Loved Ones
The readings for today address the way that the algorithms used by many of the free websites and services used can victimize individuals by forcing traumatic memories and experiences back on them. While the depth of how much the experiences mentioned in the articles hurts is not something most of us as readers can sympathize with it is easy to understand why people like that need a way to opt out. As a male I cannot even come close to how a stillborn child would feel. The closest I have come to experiencing part of that is that I am friends with two unmemorialized accounts of dead loved ones on Facebook. One belongs to a dear childhood friend that I see on certain anniversaries and the other is a friends deceased grandmother who’s living daughter uses her account to make posts and messages as if she were still alive. Seeing both of these things aren’t the result of ad algorithms but I will never want to willingly not see those posts despite the fact the former makes me tear up while the latter makes me incredibly frustrated as I want to remember them but can’t ever cut out anything of whatever’s left and unfollow them which is simple because I want to remember them.
In addition to the difference in level of the relationship shared by the mourning and lost individuals a key difference in why the algorithmic injustice is more frustrating is that I have only observed other people’s interactions and grieving process while the algorithm acts on the authors of today’s readings. My role is an observer looking back rather than a person who is literally having my personal life targeted for commercial gain.
I do recognize the injustice performed by the ad algorithms but I also understand that efficient tracking algorithms that predict wants and need are part of why we can use services for free so that the firm running it can operate. Both authors mentioned that there were ways to manually tell the algorithm you are not interested but is it possible that’s the best we can get? A pregnancy might have dozens of posts made about it over its duration but a serious complication would likely get one or none. If the program that tracks consumers is overly sensitive would it lose efficiency and therefore value?
The Importance of Appearance
Dead Set appears at first glance to me to be just another zombie show that does not deviate heavily from the already popular trends with a group of unlikely and unprepared survivors coming together to try and survive against a mass of man-eaters, while providing commentary on society.
One thing that stood out to me in particular is the zombies seem to have an obsession with not just living humans, but also the image of humans, indicated by their frequent attachment to television screens and mirrors but do not attack. Zombies having strong attachments to the human image is possibly a comment about society today, as people often have inclinations to be focused on the way in which themselves and others are presented. Conveniently most of the characters are actors within the show already and easily presented as justifiably strange or interesting characters. When the group first observes the mass of zombies one character goes so far as to ask if they’re not on television and one implies that wifi is at fault for messing with your molecules. Comments like these indicate that the speakers struggle to observe the world outside of themselves and are shallow to a comical degree. Thoughts did not turn to friends, family, or loved ones, but to irrational and unhelpful conclusions that gives them an excuse to talk. It is unclear how much personality remains within zombies as a zombie did show hesitation by not immediately attempting to eat her when faced with one it had been physically involved with. However this does indicate that zombies might be able to differentiate between people and are not so simple to only care about food.
Rub-a-dub-dub, what’s up sis?
Perhaps one of the first things that really jumped out at me is Majorie’s quote, “rub-a-dub-dub, thanks for the grub” (34), an essentially mock grace that to the best of my knowledge is a derivation of a nursery rhyme that does not include the ‘thanks for the grub’ which was introduced by the Simpsons in its first season. This phrase fits with a recurring elements of debasement and violation that appear when Marjorie and Merry add their own stories on top of previously written books, when Marjorie brings an independently produced tragically motivated story to that new world, or confesses that she enters Merry’s room while she sleeps and pinches her nose, the idea that their father is poisoning their mother and Marjorie. These elements are notable not in the sense that it’s another way of saying bad stuff is happening, but rather that concepts that are typically important to or accepted by a child Merry’s age such as undisputed faith in their father’s love or that sleep is not a state of vulnerability are stressed.
Merry may not be seriously shaken by much of this due to her understanding that her sister is unwell, but once she witnesses Marjorie’s late-night episode she begins projecting some of the images of Marjorie inside the cardboard house (54) which includes her doing inhuman things like spidering around walls. Empathizing with Marjorie becomes even more difficult due the constant distancing occurring with the increase in exogenous factors impacting her relationship with Marjorie, such as the sight of her against the wall, her mother’s notebook, Marjorie interacting with Merry and her things while asleep, and the growing things. Ultimately to me the nature of their relationship responding to their interactions while the love for each other stays the same is something I would like to keep an eye on.