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Even the nonstop clashes over school curricula come down to parents trying to ensure their children are only exposed to approved information, presented in approved ways.
#Black mirror wiki tv#
Pressure from parents has given birth to an increasingly granular film and TV rating system, warning about every aspect of potentially controversial content. Individual parents and organized groups frequently call for books to be banned from public libraries. And these technological solutions are just another salvo in the endless societal war over how much freedom children should have with their media.
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Software like SafeSurf, Net Nanny, and Qustodio, or parental-control suites like Google’s new Family Link, lets parents filter what their kids can see online. Still, a recent workplace experiment in Wisconsin has shown how ubiquitous the technology could become.Īnd leaving aside the idea of personal implants, there’s an entire cottage industry in non-invasive, wearable tracking devices for kids, and another one in spyware that lets parents monitor and remotely control their children’s phones. Domestic pets often have those chips now, but human chip implants are still more of an area for body-modders and first adopters.
#Black mirror wiki series#
The market availability of tiny RFID chips has raised a long-running series of debates about whether children could or should get microchip implants that can help parents track them, or ensure lost children can be identified. “Arkangel”’s tech concerns have plenty of real-world analogues. As Sara grows up, she and Marie increasingly clash over the Arkangel system, which differentiates Sara from other kids, makes her feel overprotected, and even limits her from reacting to emergencies, because the system decides she might be upset if she saw what was going on around her.Īrkangel’s technology isn’t implausibly far from current, real-world gear The system includes a cranial implant for Sara, and a tablet that lets Marie monitor her child’s location and medical stats, see what she’s seeing, and even censor visual input that might be considered upsetting.
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Terrified by the consequences of a momentary, understandable lapse in attention, Marie opts into the early trials for an experimental new product called Arkangel.
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Her anxiety and guilt play out over and over throughout Sara’s life, but the crux comes when she briefly loses 3-year-old Sara at the playground. “I couldn’t push anymore.” She’s already feeling inadequate as a mother, as if she’s let her daughter Sara down even in the manner of her birth. “I can’t believe I couldn’t do it,” she says miserably. “Arkangel” opens with a young mother named Marie (Rosemarie DeWitt) undergoing a Caesarean section. The script is just too single-minded about the concerns it raises. “Arkangel”’s scenario has plenty of potential in ways that might have made it more frightening and more intriguing. For once, Brooker doesn’t take the premise far enough from our present reality: the episode doesn’t say much more than “helicopter parenting is bad,” and “holding too tightly to kids will just push them away.” It’s particularly frustrating both because the latest season of the show includes some series highlights (particularly “Metalhead” and “Hang The DJ”), and because the season is otherwise so diverse in its targets and approaches. That’s the problem with the fourth season’s weakest installment, “Arkangel,” which follows the usual Black Mirror pattern of pushing existing technology a few iterations into the future, then considering the nightmarish consequences. The weaker episodes, though, can come across as shallowly scolding, or worse - just a little too obvious. The best episodes are imaginative and daring, but they also tap into real concerns, like the way politicians are tailoring their behavior to please the fickle, easily swayed social-media crowd (in the first-season episode “The National Anthem”), or how the ability to rate services and companies via apps has turned us all into horrible bosses (in the third season’s “Nosedive”). Spoiler warning: This essay does not give away the ending of “Arkangel,” but does broadly address its plot.Ĭharlie Brooker’s tech-horror anthology Black Mirror is largely about exploring the downsides of the way we use technology. Other essays in this series address “USS Callister, ” “Black Museum,” “Hang The DJ,” “Crocodile,” and “ Metalhead.” In this series, six writers will look at each of the fourth season’s six episodes to see what they have to say about current culture and projected fears. The fourth season of Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror, a Twilight Zone -esque anthology TV series about technological anxieties and possible futures, was released on Netflix on December 29th, 2017.