I’m
not sure what to make of this issue of Unfollow.
Clearly it’s set in the middle of a story arc, so I’m confused as to what’s
actually going on, and hard to discern the good guys from the bad. But one
thing is clear: Larry Ferrell, for all the billions high-tech social media has
earned him, has total disdain for modern technology. He views it as an
addiction, and I’m not certain he’s wrong.
In
issue #17, Williams and original co-creator have their characters stranded in
the forest, with nothing but their own skills and knowledge to shield them from
any variety of dangers. Ferrell is presented as the villain of the piece, but I
can’t help but wonder: Is he really?
Ferrell
may have a tenuous grip on sanity, but as he states in the comic, “The most real
world is the one we spend most of our time in.” So the perception of reality is subjective.
And, by extension, our perception of slavery and addiction. Perpetual problems
for a digital age.
Back
in the early/mid-1990s, the Internet was very static. Videos were in sound
bytes that lasted only seconds at the most. Yet one of my friends sacrificed
much of her social life at the altar of the PC, spending hours surfing the web.
I couldn’t help but see such immersion as unhealthy. Little did I realize how
pervasive the web would become. I’ve heard high school students whine about
writing essays, when they have the sum of all human knowledge literally at
their fingertips.
At
the risk of sounding like a crusty old fart, in my day we didn’t have smart
phones with access to Google or Wikipedia. Researching a term paper required
labor, data mining by hand the local public library’s card catalogs, and the
massive index to periodicals.
Unfollow
might be a cautionary tale against having too much dependence on technology.
Nevertheless, it’s ironic that Comixology offers it in a digital format.