Unit 3 Reflection: Our Obligation To Listen When A Voice Is Used
Video Reflection:
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Transcript:
Hi everybody. So for this week's reflection on cultural values and personal identity in digital spaces, I really got thinking about this idea of psychological continuity and personhood, specifically the boundaries based conversation around non reductionism, this idea that non reductionists say that we must appeal to some further fact. I think this is really interesting in the context of the Phineas Gage story. Really this idea of transposition as a human from one thing to something else, and this idea that he was no longer himself as the anecdotes go.
I think we see this transposition of form inside of grief tech platforms where we become something else after death, and when we transpose this idea of the physical to the digital or form changes, even though we have the synthetic appearance and representation of a voice and in many instances appearance as well. So, this this idea that Locke originally has in the ability to be conscious of current from past experiences. Those things are in many ways the data inputs of a grief tech platforms. The stories are incredibly important to how the that information is harvested, and the psychological continuity of past experiences in the sense that they lay the groundwork for the person for the people that we are today. They also become how we think about the preservation of the future as well.
So an extreme, really the inverse of remembrance efforts inside of grief tech is this idea of anonymity. And there's been growing moves to distrust other people other people's ways of following social norms when they are anonymous, but in many ways, the following of extreme remembrance is also a disruption of a social norm. The personal disclosure of intimate details of life stories and thoughts preserved for those who survive inside of grief tech platforms. It's the opposite of the kind of empathy deficit that you get with anonymous online behavior, in that it's extremely empathic in substance and highly relational. It's intended for loved ones and platforms like Hereafter or Storyfile, and they even advertise themselves as the perfect gift for Father's Day, something like that. So in many ways, these things are two sides of the same coin in terms of the online disruption of social norms. Anonymity engagement is temporal and grief tech tends to be more enduring or certainly positioned as being more enduring.
When we think about permissions around grief tech, and the restoration of life, these permissions are not unique to digital spaces. In fact, they absolutely predate digital spaces. They're cultural, especially when we think about things like the culture of Ancient Egypt, where writing or speaking someone's name essentially restores them to life and the notion of sharing a person's voice keeps them alive, and part of our world after they’ve physically died. So when it comes to platforms of grief tech, there is really this this extended idea of the transgression of a silent vocal boundary, the boundary being the boundary between life and death. Inside of grief tech platforms, we keep the synthetic feeling of someone alive inside of periods of grief, and it becomes monumentally as we, as we learn here, it becomes monumentally more complex, because of the speed and quantity of information by which those social norms are being molded.
I want to give the final word here to Toelken, who collected Navajo stories, and I think is really, really important when he says that it's instructive to record in contract disputes, a mediator usually resolves issues in favor of the party that was not in control of the advantages. And when we talk about permissions around grief tech, we are obligated to listen to that voice when they use it.
So who has permission and who owns the data, whether it's the person who recorded it, the person who posts it, or the person who consumes it is still very, very ambiguous, highly culturally motivated and cause for great ethical concern as these platforms develop.
