Playing the Numbers Game
In the scene when Lacie gets a ride from the truck driver, Susan, she becomes defensive in explaining herself to someone who has sworn off living her life the way Lucie does: according to her rating. Lucie says, “playing the numbers game, that’s how the world works”. Does this apply to our world too?
The way that Lacie looks through Naomi’s profile, her pictures and the comments, and compares her life to it is something that I find is quite easy to relate to. Social media has made it so simple for us to do this. We are constantly looking at other people’s lives through social media as if it captures every aspect. We look at followers and views as a measure of popularity and an affirmation that the life that we share through social media is lived right. We shouldn’t use this form of social currency to define us. If we did, we would be living in the same world as Lacie and Naomi. Naomi doesn’t have any real friends and Lacie is convinced that her life will better if she has a higher rating.
As familiar as the behaviour in the episode was, I don’t believe that we live in their world yet. Yes, our lives are consumed by our phones but our phones don’t have the ability to define. We have to be sure that social media doesn’t have the ability to define us either. A lot of people come to realize the effects that the dark side of social media can have but everyone must recognize the bad social media habits that we find ourselves victim to. I think that working to recognize the role of social media and it’s dark side is especially important for younger people who have, and will, grow up not knowing any alternative reality.
It is so easy to be consumed in social media, like Instagram or YouTube and using it as a measure of comparing our life to someone else’s. I know that I am often guilty of this. And the people that I compare myself to, they’re guilty of it too. It’s human nature. It has been made easy through social media, but we have to be aware of the danger in doing so.
The world in this episode doesn’t seem that far off, rating everything we do is very familiar. We react to videos, like photos, rate drivers, food and travel destinations. However, we don’t rate each other in all of our personal interactions. The decisions we make and the mistakes or successes that inevitably follow don’t hold such as immediate and quantitative effect on us. We don’t rate other people. This is what Nosedive depicts. Lacie and Naomi’s world showed little ability to step away from the rating system or offers an escape. Lacie had to travel several hours, have a major breakdown and be detained in order to come to any realization of a dark side to the world she had been living in. In our world, we just have to put down our phones and step away from social media for a little bit.
