Watching the newly released Final Cut version of "Blade Runner" through a Web 2.0 lens, my colleague Adam Richardson has some interesting thoughts on the construction of our identities:
"When the movie first appeared it was widely seen as a philosophical questioning on what it means to be human, combined with angst about the growing power of computers and concerns that they would eventually surpass humans in intelligence with apocalyptic consequences.
Today those concerns have to a large extent abated, and instead Blade Runner now resonates with themes of construction of identity and how much of our own identity we own. In the movie, the robot Replicants have memories implanted to make them more mentally stable, but they all share the same memories. The memories exist in their minds, substantiated by a handful of photos.
In the MySpace/Facebook/blog/Flickr world, we externalize our memories more than any time in history, constructing our identity one posting at a time. But by the same token, people are able to create their own memories of us, and therefore create their own versions of our identities, sometimes without our knowledge and usually without our control.
While the Replicants of Blade Runner were beholden to their makers for their memories, we today are also highly reliant for others on the construction of our self identities."
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