Screening Surveillance with sava saheli singh and Nehal El-Hadi

This talk was about Data Surveillance and how it shapes both the present and the future. It was talking about a short film that showed the effect of technology on us and mainly on health care. Sava, the filmmaker, thought it was so interesting making this movie because it involved both creativity and an academic perspective to the movie. She thought that the movie has to have a message behind it and she got information from the Surveillance study center itself. I think that this made the film more authentic and real.The movie is about how we deal with technology and how we respond to it and the changes it did to health care. As we can see in the short film, technology affected the girl deeply. This movie actually scares me, because as you can see we can be easily tracked and followed from our social media platforms without realizing . They tracked Jay’s social media accounts and they judged her because her pictures without even giving her the chance of explaining herself. They stopped her prescription and they gave her a device that monitored and tracked her movements. She has anxiety and the pills she took was to make her better and because of this stupid system, they stopped giving her the prescription, which led her to have more anxiety. Technology is insane, it can be dangerous in some way. This video shows the future effects and usages of technology, and some guests thought that this movie was inspired by Black mirror, and actually i thought this too. However, Sava said that it was not inspired from Black Mirror, but it she said that this movie is different as it shows what can technology do these days, unlike Black Mirror. When they came to the process of the movie itself they found it so easy and the writer, Nehal stressed on having a girl with color just to show how they are treated differently. This short film portrayed data surveillance so accurate and it showed how students in college have anxiety. They need the system to help them out not to pressure them more and come against them. At the end of the talk when we were asked what one thing to change about the film, we thought that it was perfectly done.