I wrote I’m Bored on Earth, Take Me, as a commentary on the impact of social media on human interaction.
Human beings need constant authentic interaction. Watching snippets of strangers’ lives on social media is no substitute for the real thing. It’s comparable to masturbating to pornography. It will only bring more unfulfillment and worse performance in genuine circumstances. I know this through my own experiences during the Covid lockdown.
Mauve hints that she knows she has a problem with social media because she wants to know if she’s popular on the alien social media, but she also acknowledges that she feels she’s been programmed through her exposure to social media to want to know. To get the dopamine hit from the virtual likes and views. I feel like we all know social media is conditioning us to consume their data, but like any drug, of course, it feels good.
Mauve’s dull life on Earth, without authentic meaning through work or relationships, made her lose touch with the reality of living. So, when she is confronted with real aliens and thrilling new experiences, she reacts with genuineness and her own honest emotional and physical reactions become addictive for her. Because nothing beats a shot of adrenaline, real fear or real orgasms given to you by another person or in this case, an alien.
Unfortunately for Mauve she is being held in this authentic reality as a pet. But in the end, she deems this better than being on Earth. I also hint that Mauve is an average looking woman and she feels that men don’t look at her with the sexual desire that the aliens do. Despite the extra pubic hair she’s been given (I could write a whole paper on the negative impact of social media with regard to younger men and women’s idea of beauty). I just wanted to point this out as it also weighs into Mauve’s decision to be content with the aliens (although she has no choice which is another facet I will not dive into because it’s the age old question: Are any of us really free?).
I’ve also noticed that people who are addicted to social media, (through no fault of their own), are more susceptible to believe outrageous stories they see online. Just as Mauve didn’t think the aliens behind the social media account were real, despite statistical evidence and numerous eyewitness accounts of alien abductions that she was consuming on social media at the time of her abduction, (There are over 200 billion solar systems in the Milky Way. There is no question about there being other sentient life in the galaxy.)
I can’t help but contrast it to an episode of “What We Do In the Shadows” (S2, E4, The Curse) where the vampires believe they are going to die because they received a chain letter email that said if they didn’t forward it on they’d be killed by Bloody Mary. As they are centuries-old vampires, they take what people say or write seriously because when they were alive, that was their reality.
Mauve, on the other hand, only takes what certain people tell her as truth, but adding an extra layer, what Mauve deems as a genuine source is unique to her. Meaning her truths may not be the same as other people’s realities from her socio-economic or cultural background which is a new phenomenon in the 21st century. Her truths are not part of a generational shift, like with the vampires mentioned above. Today, substantial portions of the population today disagree on facts across the board. It all depends on what is on their social media FYP looks like and I would argue that it’s more diverse than ever before in history.
Meaning despite all Mauve knew about aliens, which was probably quite substantial as she was watching a lot of alien stuff on social media, no one that she trusted explicitly told her aliens were real, so therefore she didn’t believe in aliens until she was abducted.
This way of consuming information is risky because it makes it easier for people to be suspicious of each other, unable to unite in large groups for meaningful causes that affect substantial portions of the population (because there aren’t big enough groups of people uniting behind one movement). And it negates humans of the 21st century being the most educated population in history (having access to global information to make better decisions about our lives). Instead, we allow a few (as we always have) to control the masses. Not through brute force, but through social media, and its main weapon is to distort the way we gain information and divide our natural way to form communities. To me, I see it as blurring reality.
I like social media but at the same time, it’s a frightening technology and I worry about humanity. Where is this technology taking us?
Please keep yourselves safe from aliens. Given the stats there are probably a lot of them out there.
Thanks for reading.
Best,
Olympia x
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