Monday, November 12, 2018

Black Mirror and Wired Article

The Black Mirror episode, NoseDive, describes a society where everyone is judged/ rated on how others view them. In order to have a high self-ranking, you must have a pretty smile, be a nice person,  have a perfect laugh, visibly exercise daily, and much more. Everyone that wants a high rank, has to make sure every single day that they appear to be a perfect, flawless human (robot).
I have never been a fan of this episode simply because it is scary. To me, it is scary to see a society that is so self-obsessed and technology-obsessed because deep down I think we all fear that ours will one day be to that extreme.
This episode relates to us with our social media presence because we are also judged on what we put out there for everyone to see. How we show ourselves on the Internet is how people are going to know us and remember us.

The Wired article compares to the Black Mirror episode in that Liu (and society) can literally do everything with his phone. With a smart phone, you can pay for rides, food, bills, groceries, etc, and pretty much anything else you would want to do, without ever leaving your home. This new Alipay tool is developing more and more invasive. The company added the idea of calculating a credit score based on people's individual everyday activities ("credit for everything in your life"). This company will also judge whether people are "good" or "bad" and put limitations based on their ruling.
He goes on to say that while in Shanghi, he attempted to rent a bicycle and had to pay a fee because of his "middling score". That is very much like the show. The article continues to become more and more like the show; at one time stating, "if your friend are all high-score people, its good for you. If you have some bad-credit people as friends, its not nice."

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