Makeup Exploration - Level 5
Title:
Exploring Body Identity And How It Has Changed In Relation To The
Development Of Technology And Socialization
Traditional methods relating to body identity, such as tattoos (scarification), and
piercings, are often related to religious aspects. Whereas current trends, such as
surgical procedures, are mainly applied for aesthetic reasons due to confidence issues
or however could be to improve human capabilities (Turner,1999,Featherstone,2000,p
39-49). Exploring the advances of technology and theoretical views of society will
hopefully enable an insight into the possibilities and visuals of what the future may hold
for the human body and looking at what makes robots different to us, and why it could
be easy for them to become superior over humans Research of performances that
portray body modification, cyborgs and robots, shown in the media, will produce a
perception of the issues relating to body identity and modification.
How Robots Exploit Humans: Black Mirror (2017)
In the first part of my essay I am going to be looking at the television series Black Mirror.
The series is about a mother and a new futuristic device called Arkangel which involves
implanting a chip into your child's brain to invision their sight and health through what
looks like an iPad. The series is interesting as it gives us insight into issues that could
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Makeup Exploration - Level 5
potentially affect us, if technology were to develop this way. I am particularly interested
in episode 2 of series 4, when the use of Arkangel can ruin their mother - daughter
relationship and damage their trust.
The device was manufactured to make a parents lives easier, therefore “Arkangel” asks
us to imagine a not-so-distant future where parents can essentially hack their kids’ brain
with a microscopic chip. It allows helicopter parents to not only track their children via
GPS, but also monitor things like heart rate, blur out harmful images, and most invasive
of all, see through their eyes.Once they are put into a teenage family setting the change
is dramatic, especially as the daughter is unaware the mother keeps in contact with the
device.
At the end of the episode, the mother uses this device way beyond her own advantage
becoming obsessed with spying on her daughter’s misbehaviour actions. This ends with
Marie the mother ending the daughters relationship by threatening the boyfriend behind
her back, with further results of the daughter finding out and aggressively abusing her
own mother physically and moving out for good.
Kerstin Dautenhahn (Professor of artificial intelligence school of computer science at the
University of Hertfordshire) replies in an interview online with ‘Discover’
Robots are machines, more similar to a car or toaster than to a human (or to any
other biological beings). Humans and other living, sentient beings deserve rights,
robots don’t, unless we can make them truly indistinguishable from us…… We
might give robots “rights”...
