Inbox: Connecting People

The second film we watched is called Inbox, an 8 minute film about a woman buying a teddy bear, and a man at the same store buying underwear. When they get home, they realize that they have the wrong items in their bags and the bags allow them to magically communicate with each other from different locations. They are using low-tech post-it notes to communicate, but the post-it notes magically get transported between the two. When the man's bag becomes ripped, they can no longer communicate so they become sad. The man goes to a park bench, where he sees a woman next to him with the identical bag realizes that she is the woman he had been communicating with. The two smile, and he produces a post-it note saying he was sorry, and she produces a post-it not saying she missed him. They are happy as the story ends.

I believe that the bags and communication between the two represent the internet. The internet seems quite magical, but allows us to connect with each other and access an infinite-seeming amount of information. This is quite a gift and quite utopian. But embedded in this story is the fact that the technology cannot fully replace human to human contact. At the end, the two were face to face, which made them incredibly happy.

However, they were happy as they were exchanging cards through the bag, and at the end...they were communicating via post-it notes....which is the way they were communicating remotely. So if I take a pessimistic view, I could consider that dystopian because in the end they were still communicating the same way.

I almost said they were not communicating in a human way, but I guess writing is human. I guess if you produce sounds with your voice, and someone hears those sounds with their ears...the contact is more human, and we are social beings. We need each other, and I would hate to think that personal contact would be superseded by technological contact. My interpretation is that technology can bring us together, but eventually we need face-to-face contact with each other.