Author Archives: Rebecca’s Radiant Realm

Postman’s Ideas and Black Mirror

My original summary and analysis is as follows:

Postman’s ideas relate to Black Mirror when it comes to technology being a friend. Very rarely do these episodes start as technology being the enemy. What Black Mirror shows is that technology only becomes the enemy when humans emotions, instinct, and actions corrupt it. I really like what Postman said, “Our relationship with technology isn’t black or white; it is black and white.” I think that Black Mirror reflects this very well. The show is very complex when it comes to the world building of a real or virtual world, as well as building relationships of the human characters to allow the audience to fully grasp the situation and sort of live through it with the characters.
How can I make this a better summary and relate the technopoly ideas with Black Mirror.

At this point I submitted it through Dr. Oblivion and asked how I can make this better. Here is his response:

From this feedback I think that a parallel from the show to Postman’s ideas are in Chapter 5: The Broken Defenses, Postman says “False or misleading information on the internet has become a rule, and can often out-perform more reliable sources.”. I see this in everyday life currently but in Black Mirror the technology is more advanced and in some cases have a mind on its own. In Season 5 Episode 3: Rachel, Jack, and Ashley Too, it features a robot who it, itself is gaslit by her makers. The robot Ashley Too is a doll that was made with the musical conscience of a pop star and when the robot learns this it starts to malfunction and breakdown. If misleading information, or gaslighting is taking robots down or in theory don’t have a conscience then why are we, humans, expected to deal with it everyday and just know what is or is not fake news.

Black Mirror Film Review: If you could do it all over again, what would you do differently?

The tech noir film I chose to watch was Black Mirror and I watched Episode 4 Season 3 “San Junipero”.

Here is Dr. Oblivions recommendations for this analysis

This episode deals with the ideas of mortality. This episode features an elderly pair of people who are in a virtual world (San Junipero) in which they can live as their younger selves. The characters Yorkie and Kelly fall in love in this virtual world and as they fall deeper into their friendship, Yorkie asks for their friendship and love to be more and Kelly decline because back in the real world she is married to a man that she loves. Then they meet back later in time at San Junipero and Kelly reveals that she has cancer and wants to leave San Junipero. Yorkie asks Kelly, as her final wish, for them to live together in the afterlife.

This episode makes me sob. The idea of elderly living another life and getting to do things over again, fall in love again, and live young again is something that makes me sad. My parents often reflect back on their lives and think what they would do differently if they had the choice to do it over again (the answer is often nothing) and that kind of reflection on life feels so final that it makes me feel sad.

Black Mirror is considered Tech Noir because it mixes humanities new innovations of technology and how that mixes with human instinct. The show is made interesting because the humans that are interacting with the technology are often faced with conflicts that are simply made by themselves but enhanced by the technology. “San Junipero” was made a conflict because of the human instinct to feel emotions and make choices that benefit them and the technology of the virtual world allowed for and enhanced the emotions that the humans living there felt. The technology introduced in this episode confuse the lines between what is real and what is fake, which allows the humans in this virtual world to make very real mistake and feel very real emotions.

Review edited 1/24/25

Meet Evelyn (Lynn) Calico

Evelyn (Lynn) Calico is a 26 year old woman who is currently living in New York after she moved out of her parents house in Helen, Montana. She is currently a journalist for the New York Times and she is a hard worker. She is short and beautiful. She wears heals to work, has a strong posture, and a stern voice to gain respect in her field. She has green-blue eyes and longer hair than she knows what to do with, so her hair is always in a neat bun.

If there is anything she has learned from her parents its how to be a work-a-holic. She is almost always on the job and all within in her own volition. Her favorites stories are the crime column. She doesn’t want to be a detective but she enjoys the puzzle, mystery, and thrill that the stories give her.

She doesn’t have many friends because she doesn’t get out much but she does enjoy her free time almost as much as she enjoys working. Her nights off look like a nice book and a glass of wine. She enjoys any Agatha Christie books and she also enjoys hate watching some really bad reality TV. She likes living expensive so her favorite food is a rare ribeye steak at the fanciest restaurant you know.

Even in her independent life she misses her family so much. She has an out of sight, out of mind mentality but her favorite possession is a framed photo of her family that sits on her bedroom vanity.

“As women achieve power, the barriers will fall.” Her motto and goal.

The sound of the story

This assignment is called Pictures are Larger than Words. I had a tough time at the start for many reasons. I had forgotten how to screen record first and foremost but I also had no idea what scene I was looking to do. I knew I wanted to do something in Tech Noir so I looked to the TechNoir/Cyberpunk Films/TV list given at the start of the class and browsed through to see if anything caught my eye as interesting. I thought about doing another Black Mirror episode but the scenes I were thinking of were already without dialogue and were just with sound to tell the story along with the visual aide. So instead I went with Tron: Legacy.

At first, because I had chosen an action scene I thought I wanted to add some action music to the background but the film already had a killer soundtrack and I dont think that I could do better or tell a good story with something different but in the same genre of music. So I went with a eerie background noise and let the scene tell itself. Using a mix of a low rumble and a sci-fi machine noise I was able to create a background noise that is not close to the noise already used AND could even tell a different story depending on how the video and/or the sound makes the audience feel. With the more eerie approach I think that the kind of suspense that the scene gives you is now different than the suspense it used to be.

Click on the image for the video

I used iMovie for Apple to create this video and uploaded it (unlisted) on my personal youtube. I first searched for a scene from Tron: Legacy on Youtube and found one that caught my eye. I watched the video with sound and started to think about the type of music or background I wanted to use to replace the audio in the video. In iMovie I used the free audio they had available and I used the sound files “Drone Dark Suspense 02” and “Strange Machine 02”. These two files mixed together give me the type of eerie vibe I was going for. I didnt want static noise so I have the “Strange Machine” to give some sort of variation in the background noise and then “Drone Dark Suspense” was used to get a low humming noise that is used in a lot of horror movies to give a suspenseful feel.

What do you think the story is saying now?

WANTED: Have you seen this dog?

This assignment is the one assignment not related to this courses theme, and its about one of my dogs!

This is the assignment Spread the Word and its all about sharing our furry friends. I have so many photos of my dogs (literally so many) but I love this one photo I have of my oldest dog caught in the act of tearing apart one of her toys. This toy is no longer with us (RIP) and we know exactly why…

Straight from my camera roll onto the digital canvas this project took form. I used Procreate for Apple and created and edited my own wanted poster for Nano and her murderous actions.

So spread the word…she is a danger to the dog toy society.

We are not far…

I wanted to start this streak of assignments with a design assignment because as of right now the creative design part of my brain is a bit easier to connect to and it is something I have the right tools for at the moment. The destination poser caught my eye and I thought it would be a great way to incorporate our course’s theme to.

This is the Destination Poster. This poster is about how our society is changing to revolve around our technology, specifically the technology that we hold in our hands. The way that people use their phones in their daily life and how it consumes them is something that I see everyday and to a certain point indulge in. While I try to stay present in life it is tough with the society we live where everything is so digital and it hard to navigate through life without technology. Watching the development of technology, how we use it, and its rapid development I don’t see how “technology taking over the world” isn’t that far away. If we aren’t already there that is.

I started the process of creating this poster by simply googling “tech noir city” and looking at the images that come up and gaining ideas through that. I noticed a lot of bright colors, and lots and lots of robots. According to wikipedia Tech Noir represents “technology as a destructive and dystopian force that threatens every aspect of our reality” and seeing the collection of robots reminded me about the phones we carry in our pockets and how the overuse of them can make humans robots, which threatens our society from being the community it once was to being a technology driven world.

The editing program I used was Procreate for Apple. I googled images of people in a city looking at their phones and imported that onto my canvas. I then google images of robots in a city and imported that onto my canvas but mirrored. I made use of the empty space in the first image (the top image) and imported my text. I didn’t want to specify a place because at this point its basically the whole world so I opted to just make a commentary on where we are now, technology wise, compared to the dystopia we see in the movies that are shown to be bad.