Last Friday, as my first Rose Scholar event of the semester, I attended the Flora’s Friday Film viewing of an episode of Black Mirror. To be honest, this was the only event I could make that week, and I mistakenly thought the movie was Black Swan. GRF Ty introduced the series as a modern Twilight Zone-esque work, but I had no idea what that meant, and am still not quite sure, but I was open to the idea of watching it.

The episode was described as a world in everyone has access to records of everything humans see, hear, and do. Before watching the episode, Ty asked us to talk a little with the people around us about what that world would be like and if you would want to be in that world. My immediate thought is no. There were absolutely no benefits that came to my mind. While being social is nice, my privacy is even nicer. I could never think to live in a world where anyone could know what I did at any point in my life. That was scary. Some other people mentioned that they did not want to have information about other people and how that was the scary part, but I still maintain that a total loss my privacy is much more terrifying that having the ability to access other people’s information.

After the show, when discussing how it was with other people, someone else who also had not seen this episode before had a similar note. The technology in the episode wasn’t as developed as we expected. When the description of the premise is that everyone can access the memories of what people see, hear, and do, I was picturing a world in which we all kind of have a connected, collective memory in which the memory as an accessible recollection of information was what was recorded. I was thinking that such a memory would encompass all sensory information – feeling, actions, smell, pain, etc.

Instead, the memories are clips of what people see and hear in perfect wide-angle view (that’s not how vision works, but I guess for the sanity of the viewer it’s acceptable, but also kind of weird) and these memories can be projected onto either your eye so that only you can see it or onto one of many screens that exist in the world. There’s an implant behind you ear with a controller that you physically hold to manipulate, which also seems like a bad idea, so only you have immediate control over viewing those clips. It wasn’t a hyper-connected society where everyone knew everything – it was a weird way of recording first-person what people do. One big thing that was bothering me was the implant. The processing power and the information transfer to project memory clips onto different screens must involve a lot of heat generation, which would be bad for the device and the head it’s in.

The episode was weird. The concept seemed contrived and its low-tech feel was distracting. I get that what I was picturing as the premise would be hard to pull off in a TV series or movie, but I was just disappointed by the promise I perceived it didn’t live up to. The series was definitely hyped up before the episode started, but if the other episodes are similar, I probably won’t watch them. Ty mentioned that this was one of the less grim episodes, but honestly it didn’t really seem grim to me at all. Perhaps the execution of the technology in the show was a whole lot tamer than what I expected and therefore a lot less personally uncomfortable, but it just wasn’t my type of show.