Reflections in a “Black Mirror”

Abstract

The focus of this work is to analyse two episodes of the lucky TV series Black Mirror in an attempt to examine the descriptive trajectory of an increasingly technology-driven society. It has to be noted that the two chosen episodes describe a society seemingly working as a technological grammar which breaks down and rebuilds ubiquitous experiences and life stories more and more beyond the limit. This is not a criminalization of technology but, rather, a condemnation of lifestyles which lose their identity and become aspatial. Thus, conserving memories of the past or creating reputation become hybridized and twisted behavioural realities, which concur to structure a strongly ‘oligotrophic' nature: that of the post-human versions, that of technological mediations and organic dominions which meet the inorganic and meld with it. The authors analyse these aspects through a diachronic perspective that minimizes dialectic polarizations in order to examine the exegeses of the post-human concept within a medial representation that intensifies the discriminating and causative factors.