This was my first time watching “Be Right Back”, and I find it one of the most chillingly plausible uses of current technology in Black Mirror. I also took note of a few things that jumped out at me.<\/p>\n
One thing I noticed a lot of that I normally don’t pick up on is the use of foreshadowing. When Martha is driving she says she will “crash this van”. Watching with subtitles, I noticed that the song playing in the van when this happens is a Bee Gees song, “How Deep is Your Love”. This is an interesting question to raise for the episode, how deep is<\/strong><\/em> your love? Is it so deeply intertwined with your reality that as a loved one passes you are constantly reminded of them? Would it hurt less to get to talk to them one last time?<\/p>\n I also noticed how they made so obvious the fact that Ash’s brother had died at a young age. And father. And how his mother handled those losses by putting those memories in the attic. Which is paralleled in the end by Martha banishing AshBot to the attic. An action which I think is meant to provoke a deeper narrative. That’s one of those “hard to chew” moments that gets the viewer thinking about something taboo,\u00a0“how do we handle mourning?”.<\/p>\n There’s also a point where Martha walks with AshBot on the phone through the countryside. She ends up sitting near the suicide cliff and it was quite clear that this would become a point of climax for the character later on. Especially when the bot points out that people usually jump alone. Whether it would be Martha or a form of Ash I made quick note of the fact that one of them surely would jump.<\/p>\n From the getgo I also noticed how disconnected Ash was. Martha asks him bizarre questions, like if he wants his soup from a shoe, and he isn’t present. He just responds with a simple “yes” having not heard the question. Kind of robotic. His answering machine is also “I’m too busy or lazy to answer so leave a message”. I think this was particularly moving to me when the AshBot replies to Martha on the cliff that he only wishes to serve. The bot’s actions are clearly not those of Ash, but what the bot could learn from him. All meant as a tool for Martha.<\/p>\n And in classic Black Mirror fashion the technology doesn’t seem so far fetched. It reminded me a lot of what I think can be called Natural Language Processing<\/a>, and Twitter Bots. The idea being that you can train a computer based on a dictionary of people’s work – like Shakespeare<\/a> – and recreate sentences that are similar to what might have appeared in the original. The product and original aren’t quite the same – in fact normally they are quite strange.<\/p>\n There’s a pretty funny example of this in @KeatonPatti<\/a> on Twitter “forcing a bot to watch over 1,000 hours of _”. Olive Garden<\/a>, Porn<\/a>, Trump’s State of the Union<\/a>. The product is what is probably a human-altered script made by a bot using NLP, but they’re fun to read. While these are pretty silly examples, I know Dr. Sample you’ve also got a few bots that operate in a similar way in your Moby Dick bot https:\/\/twitter.com\/MobyDickatSea and your favorite things bot that operate on their own. It’s interesting to think of them as eventually being used to learn from our digital literature (facebook, twitter, etc) and perhaps recreate our sentiments postmortem.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This was my first time watching “Be Right Back”, and I find it one of the most chillingly plausible uses of current technology in Black Mirror. I also took note of a few things that jumped out at me. One thing I noticed a lot of that I normally don’t pick up on is the …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":218,"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-488","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-group-a"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/paB9Ga-7S","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\/488","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\/218"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/death19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=488"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/death19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/488\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":490,"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/death19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/488\/revisions\/490"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/death19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=488"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/death19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=488"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/death19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=488"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}