If you’re without a profile picture, you’re without a chance of survival among the new human breed. This is the cardinal takeaway from Black Mirror’s latest episode, “Nose Dive,” and it’s disturbingly accurate.
Created by Charlie Booker, Black Mirror debuted on Netflix in 2011, illustrating dystopian-like communities in conflict with technology-driven phenomena. In its newest series, “Nose Dive” depicts the notion of what I’d like to call, “social fitness,” a term based off Darwin’s biological definition of survival advantage.
As the scientist, Leon C. Megginson, once famously referenced Charles Darwin’s principle:
"It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change."
“Social fitness” is the means by which the new human breed will supersede its antiquated counterparts. It defines the ways in which people use social media to get ahead in their personal and professional lives. Sourcing new mates via Tinder, starting movements on Twitter, and monetizing brands (personal or not) on Instagram, people that exercise their social media muscles have an upper hand in evolving beyond those with little to no internet presence.
In “Nosedive,” writers Michael Sur and Rashida Jones illustrate this seemingly absurd form of competitive advantage into a believable and familiar one. In their world, people use a phone application to view and rate other people based on the images, videos and text people post on their own profiles. Today, there exists an identical controversial app, called Peeple, that facilitates the same behavior. Popular platforms — like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter — similar to this rating app also enable people to measure human value and create ideal identities, resulting in social castes, much like the ones we have today.
In our world, people with descriptive and active profiles on platforms like Facebook or Linkedin have greater credibility in terms of their personal identity or professional experience, bumping up their reputation as well-to-do, productive people. We’ve grown dependent on one another’s social media character, valuing our mimetic selves on social platforms rather than our true ones in person. This is, however, an adaptive property we must take seriously. We’re being constantly shaped by our booming digital landscape, and this is only one of many ways that we’ve learned to navigate technology. Social communication is continually transforming, emerging in new forms from your everyday phone app to advanced tech-wear like VR, and if you don’t know how to drive them, you’ll lose social mobility.
Black Mirror’s universe isn’t much different, as it also favors those who choose to publicly showcase their own lives via social media, particularly those whose internet personas are rated highly. Those that are rated lowly — or non-existent on the social phone app — are treated as second-class citizens, demoted to nobodies. This is an unfortunate lesson the main character, Lacie, learns the hard way after suddenly dropping to the lowest rankings in her community upon having an emotional breakdown. In essence, she breaks character and fails to play her part in the greater show she once believed a reality.
If you’re like me and find yourself in a state of natural resistance to change or if you’re not really a gym person, consider starting a social fitness routine instead. Regularly update your digital profile and become a part of the social renaissance, even if you don’t love it. We’re spending an average of 10 hours a day staring at screens anyways, so might as well make use of it in social, but let’s not become too distracted. It’s just a black mirror, anyways…right?