This day and age we are turning to having more digital relationships than in person relationships which is affecting the human interaction for the upcoming future. People are able to block, mute, and get notified by a person’s posts on social media. What’s most disturbing is that even though we’ve enhanced our ways of communicating, we’ve also been less constant with communication limited by technology. The multiple technologies converging and showing us that the “better” ways to communicate in some ways we’re taking backwards steps.

In the Black Mirror episode “White Christmas” it dived into a futuristic reality where a chip can be inserted into your head in order to gather information about yourself which can be used for advanced technical devices similar to Amazon’s Alexa or gather evidence from someone for a court case. This episode dealt with the case of a bad breakup that led to the main character, Joe, being blocked from his girlfriend. he found a pregnancy stick and wanted to congratulate his girlfriend and get ready for their family together but she claimed she did not want to keep the baby. after  this interaction he was not able to see her but months later she could see her block silhouette with a pregnant stomach. He became obsessed with checking on her and the child’s growth from a distance every Christmas. Until she passed away in a car crash which lifted the block restrictions on the child. When he went to confront the child, it turned out that she was not his biological daughter. This left him distraught asking “Where is my daughter?” towards her grandfather. Eventually kills the grandfather with a blow to the head with a snow globe and the child dies days later after going out in the cold to search for help for her grandfather. The fact that the girlfriend wasn’t upfront about her actions of infidelity during the relationship caused him to harper on and stalk her til the truth drove him to insanity. The act of ghosting a person is real in today’s day, but being able to mute and blur out a whole person’s existence from a person’s ocular lens is phenomenally frightening.

The whole episode was mainly set in the grandfather’s home based on the chip that the government implanted into his head when he was arrested for the deaths of the grandpa and child. He was manipulated to seem as 5 years had passed from the incident and was able to confess his doings. The man who was manipulating him, Matt, was the creator of the chip and also confessed some parts of his past to Joe to get him to feel like he could trust him with his truth. But once the confession was out of Joe and Matt’s job was done, the government could not ignore his confession as well and was free to go but blocked by everyone in the world. The government in this episode showed that although you may have a gift pertaining to technology they will use you and still give you a repercussion for your actions that they deem as unjust. This virus of social control in which people believe they can block and ghost people is  already prominent, but if this lens and chip is implemented into the reality of the world things will get beyond crazy.

What do you think you’d do if we have these lenses or even the chip put into us? Would you allow it or what if it were mandatory?

Implementation of Social Media Regulations??? : https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-54901083