I watched the brilliant, dark and unsettling Black Mirror, which has been constantly surprising me with how on point it's commentary is. A dystopian series of small stories, wrapped in a very familiar universe to our own, Black Mirror gives us a disturbing glimpse into the not so far future of technology and it's impact on our lives. I've always been quite cynical about how quickly technology is developing and how dependent and intertwined it has become with everyday life. I'm not going to lie, it worries me. And Charlie Brooker does a wonderful job of fulfilling my fears in this drama series.
In an interview I watched online, Charlie Brooker states he decided to call the series Black Mirror because when our digital devices are switched off, they literally look like a black mirror staring back at us. And there's something twisted, mysterious and great about that.e
Episode two "15 million merits" focused on our obsession with entertainment shows and insistent technological distractions. It is set in an alternate future where everyone lives in a tiny cell comprised of a room-size virtual screen in which every activity takes place through the currency of virtual merits. From a virtual cockerel wake-up call in the morning, to picking out food from a virtual vending machine on a screen, all activities revolve around this technological medium.
My interest is in the idea of living within a video itself...which actually isn't a new idea really at all. Games such as Second Life and Sims have been doing this for ages. They offer you the option to cast yourself in an alternate life and reality. Worrying when it leads some to spend more time on their "virtual" lives than their real ones. With all these recent new technologies such as the Wii and the X-box where you can effectively control your own virtual world with simple movement, it leaves little other activity to be desired or necessary. Instead of doing the real activity itself (such as sport) people opt to do it virtually instead. We become completely immersed in a world which essentially doesn't even exist. And the problem is that some people actually prefer it.
In this world, this is not just a pastime but a way of life. We are introduced to the main protagonist "Bing", who suffers the mundanity and tediousness of his everyday routine centred around the TV screen. He claims that nothing in his life is real, nothing has any value. He exists in a virtual space which has become a very real prison.
"The peak of our dreams is a new app for our Dopple, it doesn't exist! It's not even there! We buy shit that's not even there. Show us something real and free and beautiful. You couldn't. Yeah? It'll break us. We're too numb for it." -Bing's Speech (played by Daniel Kaluuya)
The running mood in this episode was a feeling of constant isolation. People play computer games, people play online games, people play virtual games as a mode of entertainment and escape. We can do things we can't do in reality, we can be people we aren't in real life. It's an appealing enterprise, and everyone is guilty of its beckoning. But the rise of this technology is rendering everyone to be more isolated and more introverted. Instead of everyone sharing the same reality, everyone's got their own. I think people get so lost in these "unreal" realities that they don't realise how isolated they've become.
Black Mirror is a fantastic series, and I definitely recommend anyone to give it go, and if you do, I challenge anyone not to think twice about technology after watching this.
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