La memoria como red social pública en Black Mirror

Abstract

In this text I analyze the British science fiction series Black Mirror (2011), based on two episodes: “The entire history of you” (2011) and “Arkangel” (2017). I choose this audiovisual production with the purpose of problematizing the contemporary transformations of memory, closely related to the digitalization and virtualization of social relations. Likewise, there is an interest linked to the ways of remembering and forgetting in societies where technologization is imposed as a way of narrating the affective. I address an individual and self-absorbed memory that functions as a correlate of a type of socialization that is under the imperative of control. In this way, I carry out a reading on some of the consequences of the digitization of human memory such as, for example, a paranoid literality of what happened to the detriment of a link that assumes human features of memory, such as fallibility. To carry out the work, in addition to a critical reading of the series, I recover social studies on digital culture and cybernetic capitalism. There is a confluence between the analysis of what happens with the characters in each episode, at the same time that their decisions are put into dialogue with different perspectives recovered by the field of Social Communication.