Social Media In George Orwell's Black Mirror

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Reading Respond Black Mirror is a series that combined by three stories showing a same theme of how the advance of technology and information can ruin people’s life. The first episode, The National Anthem, tells an absurd story: The princess of UK is kidnapped while the demand of the kidnapper is to let the prime minster, Michael Callow, make love with a pig in the air through the television. With the tremendous burden of public and the safe of princess Susannah, Michael has no other choice but to do what the kidnapper says, to have a sex with a pig, while the public just take it as a joke and enjoy watching the live, despite it is a humiliation for Michael. Though media can provide huge conveniences for most people, it is also cruel, …show more content…

In the episode, at the beginning of the kidnap, people’s attitude towards Michael is mostly sympathy, but after the kidnapper cut out a finger of the princess, most people suddenly change their minds, thinking that Michael should put princess’s life upon his own dignity, which put him in a more awkward situation. In my opinion, public will never show the true sympathy towards the related people, and they just give their comments, taking it as a way to pass time and entertain. This remind me of a thing that happened recently: a Chinese actor killed himself because he can’t bear the Internet violence any more. In his social media, there are so many vicious and hateful abuses that posted by nitizens, the content of which mostly has no specific theme and without a reason. After this incident, people come to realized that how the comments can hurt a person tremendously. Especially for public figures, the social media provide them with a more convenient way to share their lives with their followers, however, the comments are uncontrollable. Like Michael in the episode, there are people support him not to compromise to the kidnapper, and there are people waiting for his live show to make love with a pig. How can we deal with that situation? In my opinion, what we need to do is only determined by ourselves, not by the media. Media only provides us with different angles to view the incident, but it cannot replace us to make decisions. Besides, no matter which decision we make, there are still many people are unsatisfied, but that’s what life is: we can not satisfy everyone in the same

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