{"id":464,"date":"2019-02-19T11:19:22","date_gmt":"2019-02-19T16:19:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/death19\/?p=464"},"modified":"2019-02-19T11:19:22","modified_gmt":"2019-02-19T16:19:22","slug":"digital-zombie","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/death19\/2019\/02\/19\/digital-zombie\/","title":{"rendered":"Digital Zombie"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ash embodies remediation, a term that appeared in Ewan Kirkland\u2019s article \u201cResident Evil\u2019s Typewriter: Survival Horror and Its Remediations<\/a>,\u201d and was defined as \u201cdigital media\u2019s deployment of old media formations in constructing new media\u201d (115). In the Black Mirror<\/em> episode \u201cBe Right Back,\u201d the real Ash at the beginning of the episode is the \u2018old media\u2019 and the new robot Ash is the \u2018new media\u2019. Basically, he is a digital zombie. But the problem presented in the episode is the difference between digitized memories and memories that social media never experienced, such as Ash\u2019s memory behind his childhood photo which was sad and connected to his brother\u2019s and father\u2019s deaths. But when zombie Ash sees it, he calls it funny. Social media cannot fully replicate Ash because it works on the assumption that people put their whole lives on social media, which is impossible. Even with the addition of Martha\u2019s personal messages and videos, the artificial intelligence cannot account for Ash\u2019s life before social media which founded who he is and moments not captured between Ash and Martha, represented by zombie Ash\u2019s inability to react when Martha places his hand on her chest. As Kirkland writes, \u201cthe lack of \u2018the real\u2019 in digital media represents a central problematic for horror video games whose affect depends on evoking a tangible experience of imperilment, embodiment, and spatial depth\u201d (116). Zombie Ash struggles with the same problem. Part of \u201cthe lack of \u2018the real\u2019\u201d is the navigation between 2D and 3D, which Kirkland gives the example of video games making the connection between the player and the avatar body by using \u201cerratic uncontrollable avatar movements combined with joypad vibration\u201d (117). The joypad vibration is the physical connection between the player and the avatar body and attempts to cross the border from 2D to 3D, but still lacks the real. Ash\u2019s avatar body is physically present in 3D and has the visual details of the human body like pores and lines, but his skin is smooth. When Martha asks him how he is so smooth, Ash replies, \u201cIt\u2019s texture mapping. The really tiny details are visual, 2D.\u201d He then tells her to touch his fingertips, and she feels no fingerprint. It is the little details like that and breathing, sleeping, and eating \u2013 the lack of the real \u2013 that remind Martha he is not Ash.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ash embodies remediation, a term that appeared in Ewan Kirkland\u2019s article \u201cResident Evil\u2019s Typewriter: Survival Horror and Its Remediations,\u201d and was defined as \u201cdigital media\u2019s deployment of old media formations in constructing new media\u201d (115). In the Black Mirror episode \u201cBe Right Back,\u201d the real Ash at the beginning of the episode is the \u2018old …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":220,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-464","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-group-a"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/paB9Ga-7u","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/death19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/464","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/death19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/death19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/death19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/220"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/death19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=464"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/death19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/464\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":465,"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/death19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/464\/revisions\/465"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/death19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=464"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/death19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=464"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/death19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=464"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}