Nosedive
The netizen of today lives for the ‘Likes’. The ‘Retweets’ and the ‘Reshares’ and the ‘hearts’ and the ‘views’.
You post anything online and start anticipating people’s reactions to it. You crave the likes, and hate the negative comments. We can get way more aggressive online responding to negative comments than we can ever get in person. The internet does that to us somehow, it’s the impersonal nature maybe.
What we seek the most is external validation, it’s a basic human need. We want to be liked, to be loved. We want to be the rockstars, we want to be accepted by everyone that matters, and even by those who don’t really matter.
And that’s what we do online most of the time.
It’s hard to say where this culture will lead us, but it’s not a pretty place. We already see social media ‘influencers’ going great lengths just to get more and more likes on their posts. Some ‘digital nomads’ travel to places just for clicking pictures or even fake the locations just so they can do justice to the ‘wanderlust’ their profile boasts of.
The Netflix anthology series ‘Black Mirror’ captures such negative trends in technology brilliantly in the stories it tries to tell. One of the episodes tries to imagine a world where all of us are judged by a star rating system on a scale of 5.
Your every real life interaction is rated just like your online interactions. And your overall score has real world consequences. People with higher scores get more privileges in society. Sort of like a dystopian caste system backed by technology.
It’s really scary to think about, but it’s a fascinating episode, check it out on Netflix —
Watch this 1 min featurette on Youtube to get the gist
Nosedive
( 63 mins)
Find the episode on Netflix.
You are the average of the 5 types of content you consume most online.
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