Since I was little all over the place in these blog posts, I tried to sum up my final thoughts on privacy in the digital age. Personally, I wouldn\u2019t want anything I hadn\u2019t shared with the online world during my life to be shared after my death. Moreover, I was primarily concerned with how the sharing of these things would impact those I loved. While I didn\u2019t realize I had focused on this issue so much in my blogs until after I finished writing it, I also looked at privacy in my final project in relation to how it is portrayed in Station Eleven. <\/em>By the end of the semester I had settled more firmly on the idea that the extent to which the digital world invades our privacy is not great. I concluded, \u201cMandel\u2019s treatment of remembering in Station Eleven <\/em>at least forces us to question if the extent of information provided by the digital age can be just as much a burden as it is a gift in remembering the dead.\u201d<\/p>\n The second issue that I addressed frequently in my blog posts was what makes us human. In my first blog post, found here<\/a>, I commented that zombies seem to be particularly horrifying because superficially they maintain much of the appearance of their human counterparts. At that point, I had difficulty coming up with a concrete definition of when something stops being human (and in retrospect I never really came up with a detailed definition). I revisited this idea when I looked in depth at an episode Dead Set. <\/em>That blog post can be found here<\/a>. I wrote, \u201cWhile I watched, <\/em>I felt as though this set the characters up for a rather bleak outcome no matter what: either they died because of their humanity, or in fighting \u201cthe other,\u201d they lost what made them better, or at least different, in the first place.\u201d From this, it seems that in part, I define humanity by the ability to empathize. I reiterated this is my second project<\/a>, where my podcast used an episode of Supernatural <\/em>in parallel with a Dead Set <\/em>episode to look further into this idea. In that project I extended my claims further to the idea that, \u201cempathy for the monstrous is what makes us human, though\u2026this is not the easiest path to follow.\u201d<\/p>\n To provide a final conclusion or sorts to these thoughts, I attempted to synthesize what I have learned from the two themes that I addressed the most frequently in class. I\u2019ll be the first to admit it was kind of a stretch. But anyway, here it is: if I choose to define humanity by our potential for empathy, then technology has the ability to increase our humanity via facilitating human connection and understanding (an example of this is in my third project<\/a>, Pictorial Memorial) or it can threaten it in a number of ways such as the numbing flood of excess information or even the invasion of privacy as I detail in a number of my blogs.<\/p>\n My snapchat project is the only one that didn\u2019t get any love in this post, so here\u2019s a cool selfie from my title page to finish out my digital studies career.<\/p>\n Looking back through my past blog posts there were two themes that I seemed to revisit time and time again. The first was privacy and the digital world. The second was what defines us as human. I tended to look at the idea of privacy in relation to the digital world by inserting myself … <\/p>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/dig215\/files\/2017\/05\/IMG_5882-169x300.png\")
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