Watching Black Mirror’s ‘Nosedive’ Episode as an Illustration of Hubs and Authorities
A friend and I recently watched ‘Nosedive’ the first episode of the third season of Black Mirror. This British series, mildly dystopic, explores what the consequences of our modern technologies might be. In ‘Nosedive’, we are presented with a society whose individuals are so attentive to (even obsessed with) their online social network personas. Plain vanity alone, does not explain this however. Real advantages can accrue to one with a strong online profile: societal standing, access to certain social establishments, access to credit and even whether one can get on an airplane waitlist. See the Insider article linked here to read an analysis on the episode (of course, spoiler alert).
What was particularly interesting to me, and pertinent to what we have covered in CS 2850, was the manner in which people’s social media profiles were scored in ‘Nosedive’. People rated each other on a 5-star scale during everyday interactions. Communication technology is so entrenched in this imagined society such that there are ways to recognize people one does not even know and rate them. As I watched the episode, I thought it evoked the concept of ‘Hubs and Authorities’ in that people were acting as hubs for one another; endorsing or criticizing them. Likewise, everyone was like an ‘authority’, being endorsed or down-voted by everyone else.
Further strengthening this analogy, ‘Nosedive’ had it such that being endorsed by someone who was very popular (had a rating of higher than 4.5) was weightier than being endorsed by someone with a lower rating. Just as with ‘Hubs and Authorities’, an authority page being endorsed by a hub with a higher score realizes a bigger increase in its authority score than being endorsed by a hub with lower score.
This idea is pivotal to the entire plot of this episode: the protagonist, Lacie, needing a score that will allow her to buy a house, plans on making the best out of an opportunity to serve as the maid of honor for her now estranged childhood friend, a highly-rated person who would only have other very highly-rated personalities attend her wedding. Lacie’s rating (authority score) has to increase by a lot to get the house, and she can only achieve this quickly enough by pandering to highly-rated people who can endorse her (hubs with high scores).
It was very interesting to make this connection and watch ‘Nosedive’ through this lens. Black Mirror made its point about some of the consequences of our social media platforms, we are made to be like authority pages; we have no intrinsic value, only worth that comes from how others rate us.