Black Mirror is Trying to Warn Us

I'm borderline obsessed with social media platforms. Pinterest, Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat... I am always on at least one of them at any given time throughout the day. I check Pinterest frequently for nail design ideas, work out plans, clothes, and cute animals, but food is my favorite thing to look up on there. It literally has everything you could ever want on there. I check Facebook and Instagram just to creep on people, see what they're up to, where they are, who they are with. I, myself, don't post on there much because I think it's kind of an invasion of privacy but I invade peoples privacy when I creep.

Social media has changed a lot of ways I do things in my everyday life. Usually,  the first thing I do when I wake up is check Facebook. Then I might hop on Pinterest to see if I can make anything for breakfast with what I have in my fridge. Then I might post my food on Snapchat, secretly seeking approval from people I don't interact with much. I think social media is taking over lives, honestly. People thrive off of how many followers they have. They base their worth on how many shares and likes they get. I have seen modeling casting calls that say "only submit if you have 5,000+ followers!", nothing about being over 5'7" tall, or having unique and exotic features, or any of the other 'normal' modeling qualifications. You were qualified if you could help them grow their business through followers on Instagram...

I recently watched an episode of Black Mirror on Netflix (another technology I'm low key obsessed with) and it was about a time where people rated other people on how well they liked them on a scale of 0 to 5. Every interacting was rated with a smart phone and if your over all rating was low, you wouldn't get to do the same things people with high ratings got to do. They can check everyones rating before allowing them to purchase a house or get a rental car and if you weren't rated above a 3.2 for example, you couldn't rent a nice car, you were stuck with a shitty one. Eventually the main character (spoiler alert) went crazy over her low rating which dropped throughout the episode, crashed an old friends wedding filled with 4.5+ ratings, and ended up in jail. I think this episode perfectly puts a perspective on how other people value what strangers think. I also think eventually it will drive some of us crazy if we aren't satisfied with our likes and followers.