Kenna: Intermission 3 - Story 3

a) Optimistic media:

  • Black Mirror's 'San Junipero' (https://www.telegraph.co.uk/on-demand/2017/09/16/san-junipero-revisited-black-mirrors-heartbreaking-vision-heaven/). This is one of the only 'optimistic' Black Mirror episodes to date, the only one with a really happy ending and the only one to have won an award. It details two women, paralyzed physically instead of socially, but still struggling like Sami. The women are living through an AI program designed to transport users to any point in time and can choose to live the rest of their days inside the simulation in happiness.
  • Life-Size (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life-Size). Life-Size represents a similar story of childhood toys gaining sentience. It deals with similar struggles of understanding and accepting the human-like characteristics given to an integral aspect of childhood. Both toys, a Barbie doll played by Tyra Banks and Shalice, serve as aids in helping the young girls in each story overcome the trauma of losing a mother. 
  • Fear of a Bot Planet (Futurama) (http://pixa.club/en/futurama/season-1/epizod-05-fear-of-a-bot-planet). This episode of Futurama details the coming together of humans and machines. While the first 3/4 of the episode is fraught with conflict and misunderstanding, in this case told from the perspective of a robot society (a viewpoint we rarely get to see, as our media typically focuses on the human perspective), eventually the two races are able to accept each other and coexist.
b) Historical events detailing the glorious past of humans:
  • The Industrial Revolution (https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/timeline-events-and-inventions-during-industrial-revolution). While it could be argued that the industrial revolution led to greater greed and in the case of The Stories of Ibis, eventually the machine uprising, I think it perfectly encapsulates the "glorious past of humans" described in the book. It was a time of acceleration, where more progress was made in a few short years than had been made in the past century. It represented immense growth and capitalistic improvement for humankind.
  • Similarly, The Renaissance (http://history-world.org/renaissance.htm). The Renaissance represents growth in an entirely different way. Art, music dance and other cultural experiences underwent a 'rebirth', were reimagined, and recreated. Human thought was flourishing in a way that had never been seen before, and monumental masterpieces resulted. It lacked the mechanical advance of the industrial revolution but made up for this in artistic and cultural impressiveness. 


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