When looking back at all of my blog posts, I noticed that I seemed to be drawn to discussing similar ideas in all of my posts. Though not always obvious, after thinking about the discussion in my posts I realized that I was drawn to the idea of otherness.
In my first post, I wrote about different forms of possession were presented in Black Mirror and in The Exorcist. Regan becomes an other by being possessed by a demon while the robot-Ash is an other by nature of his technological creation. I discussed how both Regan and Ash are classified as being others through their bodily secretions–or lack thereof, in Ash’s case–and through their use of sexuality. Somewhat similarly, in my second blog post, I discuss whether Merry could be considered a reliable narrator in A Head Full of Ghosts after learning of her double otherness. Merry is the only child in the world of the story, and she was the only one to survive her poisoning the family spaghetti sauce with potassium cyanide (though I’m still not sure if I believe it), forcing the adult Merry to be an other for all her life, due to the tragedy she has lived through.
I continued my theme of writing on otherness in my third blog post. In this post I posed a question in regards to one of Carly Kocurek’s assertions in “Who Hearkens to the Monster’s Scream? Death, Violence, and the Veil of the Monstrous in Video Games.” I disagreed with Kocurek in her belief that otherness (to use her vocabulary monstrousness) causes immediate vilification of video game characters, and posed that we might actually feel sorry for some “other-ed” video game monsters.
I then had two blog posts that dealt with an otherness of perception. In one post, I argued that memorialization on websites is not beneficial because it encourages loved ones to hold on to a static image. Similar to what happens with Martha in “Be Right Back“, I argued that these websites prevent people from moving on after a loved one is lost. Looking at this post in relation to all of my other posts, I believe that I settled on this assertion because the virtual presence is in fact a false remembrance: it is an other, unable to express ideas, thoughts, and feelings behind actions. Similarly in the other post, I discussed how televised celebrity funeral should perhaps not be viewed as beneficial. I asked this question after reflecting on how the perception of a celebrity by the public could be other to the family’s perception and vice versa.
In some ways, I did find it surprising that 5 of my posts were able to relate to the same overarching theme of otherness, especially when I looked at the various topics I discussed: “Be Right Back,” A Head Full of Ghosts, possession, celebrity funerals, and online memorials were all able to unite under the umbrella of otherness. However, I am not too surprised. I tend to enjoy looking at marginalized groups and trying to tell their stories. I think this is what drove me to look for and write about otherness so much in this class: I want to hear the stories that are different from my own, and draw attention to the outsiders. In regards to death and technology, I think there is a huge potential for people to become others simply by the separation that takes place between the living and the dead, and the lack of face-to-face interaction due to the influx of new forms of technology. I think that this is a cool idea worth more exploration: how does death or dying turn someone into an other? How do people dealing with death or dying turn into an other? How do they cope with the feeling of otherness? Does technology lead to more or less otherness?
I don’t want to leave out my last 3 blog posts. Towards the end of the semester, I focused less on otherness and more on fears associated with death and technology. I’ll give it a try to relate these three posts to otherness here. I wrote about the fear associated with ethical robots, the fear of globalization, and how we will be remembered after death. I suppose the fear of globalization relates to the fear of those outside our own borders. The otherness of other nations, other customs, other germs, other immunity stems the movies that play upon this fear of the interconnectivity of the world today. After we are gone, we are immediately an other as we are no longer living, so that could be how otherness ties into my post on how we should be remembered after we are gone. As for ethical robots, were these machines to be created they would exist as an other between two worlds: not quite machine, but not quite man either.
I guess, in reality all of my posts were about otherness. They varied in whether the otherness was in reference to death, or a result of technology. It is interesting to go back and see how I was drawn to these ideas subconsciously, but I think they are a large part of what makes studying death in the digital age so compelling. We have technology that truly changes the way we see the world of the living, so perhaps it is changing the way we see the world of the dead as well. Maybe the ideas and concepts that I found to be other will become the norm in the future, and our ideas will become other-ed. Just like how death photography seems so other to us nowadays.
