Black Mirror?

For the past two weeks I’ve been watching Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror on C4 and I honestly don’t know what to think.

image from http://www.tvpixie.com

For those who don’t know, Brooker is an English Jounalist, Satirist and script writer with a flair for the savage, sometimes cruel and more often than not downright mean types of humor. I’m a huge fan of Dead Set, which Brooker wrote the script for. It has zombies, makes fun of the public’s obsession with reality TV shows and a friend of a friend was in it as a zombiefied extra.

Black Mirror on the other hand. I don’t know whether to love or hate it. My boyfriend’s reaction to the first episode sums it up well. ‘I can’t tell if Charlie Brooker is a genius and I just don’t get it or if I wasted an hour of my life’. A friend memorably put on Facebook that he would gladly have a sex change operation if it meant that he could marry Mr. Brooker. So opinions are clearly split.

To sum it up, Black Mirror is a series of three one off drama’s depicting stories based on Modern technology and where it could lead to if we’re not careful. The second one was a little more fantastical and futuristic so I’m not going to go into it here, but the first one is somewhat relevant to my Social Media studies.

We’ve been discussing how Facebook, Twitter and the internet in general have been changing the ways that people communicate, and what the consequences of this could be. These ideas where the concept of the first episode’s plot. A fictional beloved Princess was kidnapped and the kidnapper threatened to kill her unless a rather… unusual demand involving the Prime Minister and a pig was met. The twist? The kidnapper uploaded the video of this demand to Youtube for all the world to see and it had received millions of views before it was taken down and it had become the most popular trending topic on Twitter. Rather than discuss details let me link you to Channel 4’s On Demand website  because despite my reservations it is a very interesting look at how powerful some of these platforms have become.

In a way it reminded me of the video by Tom Scott about the (fictional) Flash mob gone Wrong  that we watched in class.

I just couldn’t tell it if were meant to be darkly comic or hard hitting drama, and I don’t know whether I liked or hated it. But it has certainly been something to talk about