Live Tweeting – Weeks One to Five

Throughout this semester for BCM325, Future Cultures, our attendance is based off of our live tweeting of the movie given to us that week. Sounds like a pretty cool assessment if you ask me.

At the end of this post, I have added my tweets/retweets that I have done so far, from weeks 1 to 5. The movies include; 2001 A Space Odyssey, West World, Blade Runner, Ghost in a Shell and The Matrix.

I am going to be completely transparent with you, I hate Sci Fi movies, I find them confusing, hard to follow and as I am someone who scares very easily, they tend to scare me so it has been a challenge for me to not only watch these movies but analyse and unpack them. However, in saying this, it has also come to my advantage. Having content to go through every week and seeing my peers tweets has helped me to understand the movies and properly be able to analyse and assess them myself. I genuinely believe that if it wasn’t for my peers tweets, there would be so much about the movies that I wouldn’t of even thought of or understood.

Live Tweeting, and analysing these movies has got me in a Wiki Wormhole of thinking and researching articles and videos about the future and future studies, movies and so much more. Thinking about the future is something that brings up a lot of different emotions for people, from excitement all the way to fear and everything in between. When predicting the future it is something that comes from our knowledge of the now and thinking about advances and ‘where can we go from here?’ Or other questions like ‘what could be better about this?’ ‘How will changing this, help society?’ The movies that we have unpacked have started to answer these questions. An example of this is West World. The amazing amusement park where ‘nothing can go wrong’ and you can truly ‘play’, sort of like a live action role play but you’re on a holiday, so it’s constant. It’s new, it’s exciting, its futuristic, it’s unbelievable.

Having watching these sci fi movies, it had me thinking ‘has any futuristic movie predicted the future?’ and of course, the power of Google pulled through. I found this video on the question.

worth the watch if you are also interested!

After scrolling through the comments of this video to grasp an idea of others opinions – which is actually something that I have done with every movie we have watched that I stream on YouTube – I came across the term predictive programming. It is by no surprise that prediction is a huge part of future studies and looking into the future. That is all that we can do with the future, predict. Predictive Programming is a theory brought about by conspiracy theorists that the Government and Authorities use fictional movies as a mass mind control to make the population more accepting of the future. So basically, the media we consume is more likely to make us calmly react to crazy situations that will happen in the future. This theory is not scientific but it is one that has been an interesting point to think about moving forward whilst I watch and live tweet the next half of this semester.

My engagement so far in the live tweeting is something that I am happy with thus far. I feel as though looking through and engaging with my peers tweets has not only helped me with the understanding of the movies and looking at them in a different way but it has been so intriguing and interesting to see what everyone else is researching into. I do find that I have been more focused on the research side of things and not actually sitting down to properly watch the movies. I do enjoy this and it helps me to live tweet more interesting content however I think I should spend more time watching the films. Moving forward I hope to continue on with this, but potentially comment on more tweets to engage better with my peers. I also intend to link my tweets more to lecture content and make them more factual/informative.

My tweets

2001: A Space Odyssey