The Reality of Nosedive
“Nosedive” is an episode of Black Mirror where the world is in an alternate reality. In this world, people are constantly attached to their phone and their inherent value is set in their rating. The rating given to them by their peers and are based on one’s interactions with other people. A woman named Lacey Pound is trying to improve her rating, the higher rating you have, the more benefits you gain from the society. As the episode’s name suggests, in the process of her trying to get a higher score, she ends up nosediving.
In this dystopian reality, people are constantly basing their self-worth on their ratings. Each interaction with another person can result in a rating from 0 to 5 stars. A person’s role in society, their options for jobs, activities, living, etc. were based on their rating. Obviously, our current reality is not this horrible, but it is something that is already happening. People are already basing their self-worth on the amount of likes they receive on social media. Social platforms are heavily integrated into most of our lives. Some of us can use these for purely amusement purposes, but some have a hard time differentiating their own self-worth with how other people appear to be and social currency. Their perceived value outweighs their actual value as a human being. This is so similar to the world that Lacey lives in. There are very few people who care about their scores in that reality, but I like to think that there are many of us who do not base our value on the metrics of our online personas. The biggest difference between our world and the other reality is that what we receive in society isn’t based off of our online scores. While we are not in the dystopian reality of “Nosedive” we are not too far off. I hope we never reach this level of dependency on other people’s opinions, it would be a sad day if we became that reliant.
The dark side of social media is very prevalent in this episode. People are all seeing the highlight reel of others’ lives. They are relying on the social currency they receive to the point that that currency is translated into real currency. While there is no direct online harassment in the episode, people get outright down-voted. These people could be anonymous or people that are directly in front of you. Finally, people are constantly experiencing FOMO. They are fearing that they are missing out on what everyone else is doing. Their entire lives are being made visible online, so it’s easy to experience the feeling of missing out. This could easily happen in our world.
With so much of our lives revolving around how other people view us, it is not hard to view this world as a possibility. There are a few steps that we can take right now to prevent this dystopian reality to become reality in the future. To stop the dark side of social media affects and this world on a whole is to learn how to detach ourselves from social. We need to provide the education to young people, that we are more than our social currency. We are more than what other people have to say about us online, positive or negative. Social media is a pastime, maybe a career for some, but mostly it is something for pleasure. As soon as social becomes more than that, when it relates to our self worth, we need to draw a line.
The reality of “Nosedive” is a scary one. We can only hope that we can stop ourselves from letting our world get that far. We should never find our own personal value in a score given to us by others.
