Why Black Mirror is Educational and Joan is Awful

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by Jacob Pleasants and Dan Krutka

After a four-year hiatus, Black Mirror Season 6 was just released on Thursday (June 15th), much to our delight. For the unfamiliar, Black Mirror is an anthology-style series: each episode stands on its own and tells a story about humans, technology, and society in a fictional past, present, or future. The worlds that Black Mirror envisions are often dystopian, the result of technological changes run amok. What we find compelling about the show is that it does not just peddle in apocalyptic or pessimistic narratives about the future. The show is, at its core, imaginative, playful, and satirical. The stories it tells are often unsettling, but they are also humorous and even empowering—the protagonists often (though not always) end up scoring victories in the end.

We love watching this show not only because the stories are well told, but also because it offers a valuable learning experience. Like any good work of speculative or science fiction (see our prior blog post on the topic), Black Mirror prods us to reflect on and think differently about aspects of our own society and our own relationships with technology. The worlds that Black Mirror envisions are not our own, but one of the things that makes it so intriguing is that its worlds are proximal in that they do not require all that much of an imaginative leap. Thus, as the show plays out different possibilities, it helps us imagine what our world might be like if certain trends in technological development are taken to their extremes.

A few past episodes that have really stuck with us and helped us expand our imaginations include:

  • Season 1 Episode 2: “Fifteen Million Merits” - How could a slavery regime be put into place using media and economics, and can it be resisted?

  • Season 3 Episode 1: “Nosedive” - What happens if our lives are dictated by social media “scores”?

  • Season 4 Episode 2: “Arkangel” - What happens if a parent can fully surveil a child without their knowledge?

Which Black Mirror episodes inspire or frighten you?

Black Mirror in the Classroom

In 2021, Dan co-wrote an article with Autumm Caines (University of Michigan–Dearborn), Marie K. Heath (Loyola University Maryland), and Bret Staudt Willet (Florida State University) for The Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy titled, “Black Mirror Pedagogy: Dystopian Stories for Technoskeptical Imaginations.” In short, we argued that Black Mirror can serve as muse for educators encouraging students to take technological problems seriously. The abstract read:

New technologies are introduced into people’s lives today at a rate unprecedented in human history. The benefits of technologies and the onslaught of corporate messaging can result in a pervasive techno-optimism that leaves people unaware of the downsides or collateral effects of technologies until harms are already done. With the show Black Mirror as muse, we open by imagining the story of Oya, a first-year college student unwittingly trapped by educational “innovations.” After reviewing examples of technological resistance from antiquity to Black women scholars today, we then propose two activities educators can employ to engage students’ technoskeptical imagining. First, we developed a MadLib activity that employs play as a means to creatively speculate about technologies. Second, we offer a fill-in-the-blank creative writing activity that builds on the MadLib activity while providing more flexibility in crafting their own dystopian stories. We hope this approach and these activities can work toward protecting those who are most vulnerable to the harms of technologies.

The article is open access and includes these two classroom activities. Dan has used these activities at the beginning of an educational technology class because he had noticed over the years that many students struggled to view technology critically. He assigned the Coded Bias documentary and Neil Postman’s “Five Things We Need to Know About Technological Change” talk, and then the class completed the fill-in-the-blank and MadLib activities in class. Their answers were always interesting as they imagined the dystopian ends of technologies of their choice, and then wrote dystopian stories about the disastrous effects of edtech. Dan’s hope was that this would help them think more technoskeptically during the rest of the semester.

Of course, other educators have also been inspired by Black Mirror. Casey Fiesler’s 2018 post, “Black Mirror, Light Mirror: Teaching Technology Ethics Through Speculation,” offers two class exercises that “use science fiction to think through different possibilities” too.

So, About Joan Being Awful (SPOILERS AHEAD)

For those who have had a chance to dive into the latest season, we wanted to share some of our thoughts on the first episode, and perhaps spark some conversations in the comments. In many ways, “Joan is Awful” is archetypal Black Mirror: set in a very near future and playing with technologies that are already pervasive in our society. This episode actually manages to cram quite a few current technological themes into the story, which we loved. A few things that we are still thinking about after watching the episode:

How does the “Quamputer” gather information about Joan’s life? The episode implies that Joan’s phone is “always listening” and thus is literally surveilling her in order to replicate her experiences in the show. It references the creepy experience that many of us have had where a discussion about some random product is followed up by eerie advertisements for that product following us across the web. “How did they know I was just talking about that?” While this experience has led many to wonder whether our phones are listening, the truth is actually more interesting. The short answer is: “No, the phone is not listening. You just aren’t that hard to predict.” The vast amounts of data that advertisers have about us means that they can often (though certainly not always) make creepily accurate predictions about the products that interest us and that we talk about in our daily lives. Perhaps the extremely powerful computer in this Black Mirror episode is able to make such incredible predictions that it can essentially recreate Joan’s life based on the metadata that she leaves behind? This, to us, is actually a far more unsettling notion than direct surveillance - and something of a missed opportunity in this episode.

Licensing Your Likeness. What a timely topic! This isn’t even a stretch - musicians, athletes, and others are already selling their likenesses to be used in AI-generated media. We are shifting from a world where deepfakes were initially created without consent to one where celebrities are selling their likeness to be recreated digitally by Artificial Intelligence and machine learning to be used by companies. Those who have sold the rights to their likenesses have perhaps not yet had to see themselves being widely embarrassed by their digital likeness… but it seems like only a matter of time before regrets start to be had. The impotence of the legal system to provide any recourse for the characters in this episode is both comical but also an important warning: don’t expect existing Terms of Service and laws to save us. If this is not the world we want, we’d better do something about it.

It’s Designed for Engagement. One of the moments that hit too close to home in this episode came when the head of the Streamberry service and creator of “Joan is Awful” explained why the show is about being “Awful.” Well, they tried the positive spin, but it just didn’t generate nearly as much user engagement as we all know from research showing negative, outlandish, and extreme social media posts receive more attention. Give the people what they want (or, rather, what they will engage with)! Truly, this is a theme for our times. Engagement is simply a poor value to optimize for. And yet, it continues to drive our social industries.

But Think of the Virtual People! It was a brief moment near the end of the episode. Joan is preparing to destroy the Quamputer, but realizes that there are many levels of virtual lives being simulated in the machine (including her own). She can’t just kill all of those “people,” can she? In the end, she is not swayed by the argument, although she also abdicates her own responsibility by insisting that it’s not really “her” that’s doing the destruction but “Source” Joan. Sam Bankman-Fried, Elon Musk, and the longtermist wing of the effective altruists would, of course, be horrified by the outcome of digital lives being destroyed—even if it put human lives at risk. But that’s kind of the point. The ending of the episode is a dig at that dubious ethical framework, and we loved it.

What parts of this episode stick with you? Which parts did you enjoy? Which parts did you hate? Let us know in the comments!

In short, Black Mirror delivers not only as entertainment, but as education. It inspires our imaginations to envision dystopic possibilities, encourages us to talk about technological issues, and helps us imagine the world we want. How can this show inspire educational conversations in or out of the classroom?

References

Fiesler, C. (2018). Black Mirror, light mirror: Teaching technology ethics through speculation. Next.


Krutka, D. G., Caines, A., Heath, M. K., & Staudt Willet, K. B. (2022). Black Mirror pedagogy: Dystopian stories for technoskeptical imaginations. The Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy, 11(1).

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