Black Mirror and a Bleak Future

Black Mirror is a TV show that portrays a post-modern, dystopian future in which modern technology is our demise. One of the episodes called "Nosedive" focuses on a topic that is seemingly brought up at every social gathering, in every classroom, in every conversation: our addiction to social media.

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"Nosedive" portrays a world where everyone is given ratings on a 1-5 scale by people around them. If you like someone, you give them a good rating and their overall average increases. If you don't like someone, you give them a poor rating and their average decreases. However, the average that is portrayed is not the true average of all the readings the person received. The ratings of people who are a 4 or 5 count more towards the average than someone's rating with a low ranking. That means that you want to try to impress and befriend people with higher rankings.

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Above everyone's head is their name and their ranking seen through a special contact lens. The purpose of the lens is to determine who to talk to in order to increase your own numbers. The lens also serves as a tool for social and societal discrimination. A high ranking means more friends, higher quality cars and devices, higher prioritization for plane tickets, and access to any luxury they desire. The life of someone who has a low rank is the exact opposite. Essentially, how well off you are in life depends solely on what other people think about you.

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What makes "Nosedive" so disturbing to some people is that they can see this happening to us in the future. Considering how addicted we are to social media and having people like us, it's not a far stretch of our imaginations. "Nosedive" does a great job of playing off of one of our biggest fears regarding modern technology.