Nosedive

In season three episode one of Black Mirror, we get to experience a different form of society where everything anyone does is scrutinized and they are given a rating of one to five from other individuals. This system is based off of how an individual is perceived by the rest of their peers, and also the quality of interactions you have. This leads to both a increase of fakeness among people and also a society where the popular rule everything. When the main goal of people is to get others to like us, most people tend to change their personality to fit in with the cool crowd and may do stupid things just for attention and likes.This actually happens in my generation a lot. We can see this through the app Vine. There were many people that got famous just doing stupid things and posting them to Vine. Many of the famous viners are known by name but others are just known by what they did to become famous. This is similar to what the main character does in season three episode one of Black Mirror, when she does many things to try and impress everyone to get her score up, but then she lets her own personality slip out a little and she starts to lose her rating. When she gets angry she reverts to her original personality. She want to go to the wedding of one of her super popular friends so she can get a good rating from them all. She also learns that the lower your rating, the less opportunities arrive, which is similar to discrimination to poor people in our society. At one point the main character tries to rent a car but is denied all of the good cars since her rating has dropped so dramatically. She basically becomes a nobody that people see her and drop her number. When she finally arrives at the wedding, her friend no longer wants her there because she has so low of a score compared to everyone else there, she may look like an embarrassment if people knew they were friends. When i saw this episode, I was in a high school economics class and we were learning about the power of bias in a market and how a good name or popularity can make an item more desirable in a market. I think this relates to the social hierarchy this modern generation of mine has really perfected. There are those people who have built a name and are popular. Then there are those that stay close to the popular ones and do things the popular ones want so they too are popular. And finally there are those that no matter how hard they try or don’t try, it is very hard for them to become popular. This system can move bilaterally but normally does not change very often in one of the two ways, people are more likely to become less popular than more popular.