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| Photo from FilmAffinity.com |
This particular episode of the show is titled "Be Right Back." The cast, like most episodes of the show, is stellar. I initially watched this episode while I was reading Frankenstein and writing a paper about adaptations. I ended up not using it for the paper, but it's one of those episodes that is really hard to forget. It's so timely and very disconcerting to think about how technology and science are close to making this type of thing a reality. Even if it's morally and ethically wrong to do it, there is still that little seed that's planted that allows for the "what it" thought that is hard to get rid of.
This brief summary is from FilmAffinity.com.
Hayley Atwell plays Martha, whose boyfriend Ash (Domhnall Gleeson) is a "social media addict." They decide to move to a cottage in the middle of nowhere, but then Ash is killed returning the moving van. At the funeral, Martha's friend Sarah (Sinead Matthews) tells her that they can create a real-seeming version of Ash out of all his previous social media updates. At first, Martha is grossed out, but eventually she goes along with it — and then she discovers she's pregnant. And she decides to write back to one of the emails she's gotten from the artificial, posthumous version of Ash.
The idea really is terrifying, but it's easy to see how someone who is mourning the death of a loved one could be tempted by the idea. We put so much information out the into the digital world that it's easy to see how with the right technology it could be gathered to recreate our lives once we are gone. This episode takes it a step further by creating an exact replica of his body as well. Martha does discover that there is something missing from this form that looks, speaks, and acts like Ash. What technology can't replicate in this case is human feeling and emotion.
This is a little like the concept of presence and absence that Katherine Hayles writes about in Chapter 2 of How We Became Posthuman. She writes, "Questions about presence and absence do not yield much leverage in this situation, for the avatar both is and is not present, just as the user both is and is not inside the screen" (27). She's using it in a different situation, but to tie it back to this episode of the show, Ash is living so much of his life online that this company was able to recreate his life after his death with those bits he shared/stored in the cloud. His mind and body are absent, but so much of his life is still present.
It's a little scary to think that all those little bits and pieces we share online are being stored somewhere; once we hit send or post, they are out there and we can't take them back. Our lives are no longer our own once we decide to have an online presence. We may be years away from this technology, but it's also entirely possible that this is something that could happen very soon. Think about that the next time you send a photo, a text, pay a bill, or tell someone Happy Birthday on Facebook.
