Surveillance technologies and cinematographic reflections of religion in the context of transhumanism

Technology transforms social life and builds a new mind while transforming many components of social life. While it is believed that technology, along with the idea of modifying the human body through technology, is one step closer to humanity's inner passion of divinization/immortality, individuals who are a part of the digital world are undergoing identity and body formation in both physical and cyberspace. The human body, redesigned with technology, reveals a dystopian landscape that can be integrated into mechanisms of control and surveillance. Our study addresses two concepts mentioned earlier: supervised and transhumanism, the transformation of the perception of sacredness through cinematic language, the controllable human being, and services of the future. In the examples of Minority Report, Nosedive, and Be Right Back, the sociological transformation observed along with a shift in mindset essentially manifests as the director's construction of the future. This research, focusing on the director's vision of the future, has been evaluated according to a qualitative paradigm-based situation description and phenomenological analysis. The study's theoretical framework explores mechanisms of surveillance and control from the perspectives of Bentham, Foucault, and Bauman, as well as addressing transhumanist philosophy and artificial intelligence-based technological developments. In particular, concepts such as blockchain, cryptocurrencies, smart city structures and singularity, powered by artificial intelligence, that demonstrate the applicability of surveillance and control mechanisms have been referenced in these films. In the third part of the dissertation, by deepening the phenomenological analysis with definition of the situation, the references to the use of transhumanist themes in the films as a means of surveillance and control in the construction of a new sociology are discussed, especially through the cinematic language created by the directors. In other words, the realities the directors envision for the future are examined through phenomenological methods. Our thesis examines the cinematic reflection of the evolving perception of sacredness within the context of the sociology of religion, at the intersection of surveillance technologies and transhumanist philosophy.