Fishbowl Ep. 2

March 7th, 2022

C. Fish

TRANSCRIPTION

Hello and welcome to the Fishbowl! Today I’ll be talking about “Nosedive” which was the first episode of Black Mirror season 3. I’ve honestly only watched one episode of Black Mirror before, even though I know how good its supposed to be and how much it makes important social commentary. Funnily enough this was an episode that I had actually clicked on before but had decided not to watch as I really didn’t need that extra fear and judgement about social media.

The episode was about a woman named Lacie, played by Bryce Dallas Howard, and her downward spiral caused by a funky form of social media. As soon as the episode opens you see that everyone is constantly rating each other on their phones for everyday social interactions like ordering a coffee. And these ratings really seem to matter to them. It also becomes clear quite quickly that even though Lacie is a 4.2 out of a 5 star rating, shes unhappy with it and wants to raise her number. The episode follows her through a downward spiral that the title nicely alluded to and we pretty much watch her loose everything in her life, including her sanity. In fact, by the end of the episode I was wondering how she was the only one who seemed to be going insane, surely this system would be terribleee for mental health.

Like I said, I haven’t seen much of Black Mirror before, which is why I decided to watch this, but I feel like it’s often designed to be alarmist and extremist to really slam the point home to the audiences. That’s exactly what it did here.

It was an extremely well done episode and I’ll give Major props to Bryce Dallas Howard for her performance, as well as Alice Eve for the supporting role of her friend Naomi. But I do have some concerns with it. For one, yes Black Mirror is meant to be extremist, so people might watch this and think it’s a bit farther from reality than it really is, and therefore not take it too seriously. With coincidental timing we just talked a lot about an extremely similar social system being implemented in China. People don’t rate each other on a person to person basis BUT you are awarded or docked points based on things like your credit, criminal activity, your acquaintances, and other social factors. So we’re literally seeing this in real life already!

Systems like this, both in China and in the episode, are scary because they fundamentally change how we view people. While getting advice about how to raise her score Lacy is told that she needs to spend more time around “quality people” – like. What. Its not just societal perks its literally how human you are treated. It also showcased how much people are kicked when they’re already down. This is true in the episode but also in life. When she was trying to hitchhike and was downvoted just for existing… it made me think. That kind of thing is extremely common. People look down on hitchhikers and homeless people and anyone down on their luck, and to be able to judge them in that instant takes away the humanity of the circumstances that brought them to that point. I also thought a lot about how in situations like these if people ARE kind its often because they are filming it for views, and not to actually be kind.

The only people throughout this whole thing who were kind and/or honest with Lacie were her brother and the trucker. And she told her brother she was ashamed of him and treated the trucker terribly.

I think that I’m incredibly lucky to be in a spot with my personal life that social media does not affect me much. I have absolutely been victim to judging myself based on how many followers I have or how well my posts do, but I had to force that behavior out of my life. I recognized that whenever I was feeling least like myself was when I was caring the most about what other people thought

Which does lead into the end of the episode, which was pretty perfect to me. I could go talk about that one scene alone for a longg time but I’ll keep it short and say that them screaming fuck at each other as it slowly turns into a smile and cuts to black was the first moment I felt like I was watching a genuine person. In fact, saying this now is making me realize that the episode had a bit of a weird “uncanny valley” factor in that none of the people were acting how I expect normal people to act.

Social media is a part of most peoples lives and we’re warned about the dangers all the time, but the reality is it’s still a relatively new technology and we don’t know what the potential consequences will be. So overall what this episode taught me is that the problem isn’t when we live parts of our lives ON social media, its when we live FOR it.

Thank you for listening! I hope you enjoyed, That’s all for now! Bye.