BLACK MIRROR

Zeynep Aldemir Advanced Communication Theory - COM 470 Prof. Peter Sarram December 5th, 2016 Baudrillard believes that the digital age which we live right now represents his third order of simulacra which means that the representation precedes and determines the real, masks the absence of a basic reality. Within the new technologies, information going back and forth to people, with TV and news, there is no longer any distinction between reality and representation; there is only the simulacrum. Black Mirror is a TV show written by Charlie Brooker, which displays the dark sides and unanticipated consequences of new technologies, within a dystopian society. Even though almost all of the episodes seems over exaggretad how technology will effect our lives, somehow it makes us believe that it can happen. Jean Baudrillard’s theory of simulacra and simulation works very moderated within the idea that Black Mirror burries within itself. Baudrillard quotes that “we live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning”. Within the technologies that Black Mirror is showing or the system change in the society by the new media, communities became more artificial as interaction and relationship aspects. We will get to see further information through out this paper about how people start to have less meaning of their interactions. This essay will portray an analysis of Baudrillard’s theory of “Simulacra and Simulation” using as an example of Black Mirror’s two episodes: “Nosedive” and “Fifteen Million Merits”. Since these episodes also supports other theories such as commodity fethishm, capitalist society, hegemony and consumer culture, it will be mentioned through out the paper in order to support Baudrillard’s ideas. The name Black Mirror itself as a title is trying to give a message to the viewers saying that the mirror no longer reflects the reality of the truth but portraying something darker then the real that is known. “The paradox of the real in Brooker’s dystopian vision is that feeling what is real depends more and more on images of the real, rather than experience itself.” (Rose, 2013) Baudrillard argues that the signs and the reality became blurred and hard to distinguish between each other with the hyperreal symbols and signs. In the episode “Nosedive”, it introduces us in a world were everyone is ranked by a program used in our cellphones. In this situation we can see the mobile phones as a commodity, the ranking program looking like Instagram seen as a sign and the “reality” which in this case the hyperreality can be seen as the world that they live in with rankings. The episode shows us that the society living there is based on a hyperreal world were everyone is ranking eachother with their uploads, their attitudes and their current ratings. These rankings affects the social standing of a person and if you are above 2.5 out of 5.0, people consider you from a lower class. The openning scene of the episode starts with Lacie who is the main character uploading a photo of her cookie and coffee trying to get likes and ranks. We see that rather enjoying the taste of coffee and the cookie she is more interested in showing herself to people with what she is doing and if people will like it (except it) or not. From that moment we understand that the virtual reality is more important for people in that society than the real experiences. After this scene, Lacie goes to her work and sees this women in the elevator. They have a very basic and a fictitous conversation were both of them do not enjoy but try to be nice to eachother in order to get good ranks. This is a great example of a simulation; Baurillard argues that “the simulation threatens the difference between “true” and “false” between “real” and “imaginary”. Since the simulator produces “true” symptoms, is he ill or not” (Baudrillard, page 3) In this scenerio, people are trying to simulate a reality by making others believe that they are trying to be nice and kind. When they “try” to simulate, or pretend to be nice, the person infront of them understands and ranks them with low starts, however if they simulate it then they make the person infront of them believe in the simulation and the imaginery becomes the reality. In this episode, this virtual life takes over the value of money or to be wealthy. It does not matter if you are rich or poor, royal or working class but the importance is that can you simulate to be a nice person, a positive person who has a fancy life? It is shown that even the friendships in this episode is based on the hyperreal worl of the rating application. Among the episode we get to meet with Naomi, who is Lacie’s childhood friend which they did not talk for a long time and it turns out that her rating is 4.8 living in an exclusive and idyllic island. When Naomi asks her to be her bridesmaid for her wedding, Lacie sees this as a great opportunity to raise her ratings to 4.5 because both her and her friends are from upper class. By the end of the episode, we learn that Naomi only invited Lacie to her wedding as a bridesmaid because at that time Lacie had 4.2 rating which was also a favor for Naomi. We see that both of the characters are so obsessed with this rating system that they create fake relationships, pretending to be real. With the advantage of virtual world, people like to be more careful while they are portraying an image of themselves, they have more time to contruct a real “representation” of themselves. Living more and more in a virtual world suggests in general, we creep closer to the edge that demarcates our fundamental perceptions; our notions of truth, reality, existence, and humanity itself. At the end of the episode, Lacie’s ratings go slowly to 2.0’s and this affects her in a level that she goes insane. The question is that does she really goes insane or she had an awakening of how this system is destroying her realities and priorities in life? Baudrillard would consider this system as the third phase of the image where “it masks the absense of a basic reality”. The basic reality is that this system is a simulation where manipulates the society to use it in order to fit in to the society. However, the system masks this absense by simulating this rating system as being the only truth. Lacie gets arrested at the end of the episode because she starts to insult Naomi and she threatens Naomi’s new husband with a knife. While she is arrested, the authorities take her phone away and she has no more ranking system in the prison. At the end, she sees another prisoner and tries to down rank him but she can’t. All is left with her is her verbal insults and their mutual anger transforms. They realize that the prison is more free than outside world. This ending proves the fact that we are more free in the prison than we are out because there is always people watching us, judging us or “ranking us”. The ranking world becomes the truth, the reality where as the actual reality is in the prison and outside is just an imaginary world. In another episode of Black Mirror, “Fifteen Million Merits” there is a future dystopian world imagined where the vast majority of people must ride stationary bycycles that provide power for the society. “They earn merits that allow for their sustenance but if they pedal extra time or with increased speed, they have disposable income with which they can purchase virtual luxiries. (Kline, 2016) All they know is that they have to ride bikes to earn merits, which they spend on advertising, food or for consuming products in general. The only way out to get out of this simulation and return back to the ‘real world’ is to attend to a talent competition called “Hot Shot”. Baudrillard and many other theorists like Marx argues that before people use to work in order to help to one another or create something new, or even to survive but the modern world changed this system. Nowadays and also in this episode people only work in order to buy and consume new products. Our societies job is to consume not going to work. Not only this episodes supports Baudrillard’s theory of hyper- reality but it also touches a lot the idea of consumer culture theory analyzed by Eric J. Arnould and Craig J. Thompson. “Consumer culture is viewed as "social arrangement in which the relations between lived culture and social resources, between meaningful ways of life and the symbolic and material resources on which they depend, are mediated through markets" and consumers as part of an interconnected system of commercially produced products and images which they use to construct their identity and orient their relationships with others.” (Kozinets, 2001) Basically it persuades that buying more and more products will bring happiness and fulfilment to an individual. In the world of Fifteen Million Merits people only interact with each other only if they buy products or to show, prove that they are better than one another. For example, there is an aggressive man biking next to Bing who is the main character of the episode, and he is fully immersed in the media, always trying to show that he has a lot of money, and his purchases are the best. He constantly insults the cleaners and call them fat refering to being unhealthy and not being productive at all. Karl Marx suggests work can be one of the sources of our greatest joys, in fact he argues that with specialization and division of labor this sense of fulfillment has lost it self in the process of alienation. Our economic system and technology has managed to create "production" as a process so efficiently far less workers are needed. However, Marx argues that society see this progression as a handicap since, unemployment is often associated with negativity and failure of society. On the other hand, Marx believes that it is a sign of success: it is the result of our unbelievable productive powers, but yet society and governments see unemployment as a failure. This idea is reflected in this episode with the "cleaners". It has been said that the way people progress ad make money in this dystopian society is cycling in exchange for a monetary currency. This monotone way of making money does not apply for the dominant culture such us the judges in the ‘Hot Shot’ but only for those in middle class. Those people which cannot manage to contribute by “cycling” to this system are disposed off and become cleaners where they are often ignored through out the episode, seen as the lowest part of the society. Just like people who are unemployed in modern society we often create a negative cogitation meaning they are not fur-fulling their lives. Furthermore all the cleaners are represented by overweight people which is often the symbolized or related to laziness. Hence they are seen as a failure in the episode because of the capitalist society they live in and how people are judged on value of belongings and monetary system. In the narrative this is a diret reminder for both viewers and the society living in this hyperreal world that it could be worse than doing cycling everyday otherwise “they will end up in a lower tier than they already are.” Gramsi focuses mainly on the concept of culture and the role of culture in nastionalism on the formation of intellectials and on the notion of hegemony. On top of Marx’s idea of this capital system and control, Gramsi added the concept of hegomony which is a process and expresses the consent of the subordinate classes to the bourgeois dominance. There is a superstructure and the way rulling class maintains its dominance is through hegomony, yet hegemony works through consent and consent has to be constructed. If dominant class wants to impose an idea to the lower class they will do this within the invisibility. This society in the episode is exactly a part of hegemony culture rulled by the superstructure. Other than Bing, everyone is manupilated by this popular show and they think that they are the ones who picked to watch it. In reality the rulling class unconsciously made the society believe that they watch this tv show because it is a sharing culture in their community. However in one of the scenes Abi who Bing is in love with sings her song in the show and even though they like her voice, they tell her only way of getting out of the bike-land is to be a part of the porn industry. Without any considerations we see that the audiences are supporting this idea as they are zoned out and focused to the elite ideology. They clap their hands and look at the screen as if they are robots and pressure her to “do it”. It seems like the audiences convinced her but in reality it is the rulling class who forced her to do this. With the term simulacra, Baudrillard is trying to explain how the copies of something or the representation of something (signs) replaced the realitiy. In this episode, the characters are living in a world where they are surrounded by media images. Also every person has an avatar of themselves which looks like a cartoon character who is representing them on to another. Through out the episode, this dopple or avatar becomes the only way that people can interact to eachother and with the real world. Baudrillard would agree that the audiences have become simulations (artificial copies with little references to reality) of themselves. As it was mentioned previously, the consumer culture in this episode is not only for their food but also for these avatars that represents them. With the merits they get they can improve themselves by getting new outfits or looks for themselves (avatars). For example the oriental girl in the episode, makes herself look very different than the reality with puting piercings and different hair color even though she does not resemble that in the slightest. However since people start to see themselves only through avatars the simulacra becomes the reality and people start to believe in those avatars rather than real life conversations or interactions. Like it was mentioned before these avatars represents them in real world, in the show “Hot Shot” we see that the audiences are the avatars who are watching the show from their room but represented as being their at that moment. This also falls in to the definition of simulacra because people are just there in order to show an appereance but it is an representative absence appereance. At the end of the show, when Bing puts the knife on his neck and starts protesting towards the system, the judge twists his real feelings to a show and says this is the most heartful thing that I have ever seen it this stage. At that moment again, the real becomes the hyper-real, the truth becomes the fake and fake becomes the truth. After that the judges offer Bing a place within its fold, absorbing him into its own infrastructure so that he may be controled. At the end of the episode we see that Bing is living in a better place, not cycling anymore and doing his weekly broadcastings however at the last shot we see he is still looking out of a screen where it means he is still under control, living in an hyper-real world. In the world of Black Mirror, almost every relationship, interaction or even the sturcture of the society is hyper-real. Everything is replaced with simulacrum, and there is no more a certain truth, reality. Within the future technology, Baudrillard argues that we only “approach to each other and the world through the lens of these media images” such as the advertisements, singing contest that Fifteen Milion Merits and the Instagram app that Nosedive had. Baudrillard goes on to further define the concept “…subjects are detached from the outcomes of events (political, literary, artistic, personal, or otherwise), events no longer hold any particular sway on the subject nor have any identifiable context; they therefore have the effect of producing widespread indifference, detachment, and passivity in industrialized populations.” We became a society were everyone is detached from on another and only attachement we have is through technology and virtual reality. Baudrillard’s theory is more understandable for today’s world were we cannot trust the truth about social media or how manipulative the idea of commodity fethisim became. In the Black Mirror society everything is replaces with simulacrum, nothing is truthworthy and you can not guess if someone is simulating or pretending. To conclude, through out the years a lot of theorists supported the idea of Marxist capitalist system however Baudrillard, added more to his theory by seeing the post- modern world. Black Mirror is a good example in order to understand Baudrillard’s theory because, Black Mirror itself is a series of hyper-real images. “The paradox is that this loss the symbolic and the lemantable effect of total simulation are illustrated well by hyperreal images in Black Mirror, especially in these two episodes”; “Fifteen Million Merits” and “Nosedive”. (Kline, 2016) References:

- Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan, 1994. Web. - Kline, Kip. Baudrillard, Youth, and American Film: Fatal Theory and Education .Lanham, MD: Lexington,2016.Web. - Kozinets, R. V. (2001). "Utopian Enterprise: Articulating the Meanings of Star Trek's Culture of Consumption". Journal of Consumer Research. 28 (3): 67–88. doi:10.1086/321948.JSTOR 254324