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“Arkangel”

A particular episode of Black Mirror called “Arkangel” focuses on extreme surveillance done by a parent.  There is a chip put into a little girl’s head that allows her mom to see what the child sees and also see some of her moods.  Not only that, but she can completely block certain images and sounds from her daughter’s head.  The mother controls the technology and the chip from a tablet and can access her daughter in this way at any time.  There are a bunch of examples of how this amount of surveillance and evolution in technology science can cause drastic problems. 

The mother shows signs of being overprotective from the beginning of the episode, when her three-year-old daughter is obviously big enough and capable enough to feed herself and walk, but her mother still pushes her in a stroller to the park and her grandfather feeds her while she sits in a highchair. The mother losing her temporarily at the park when she is three seems to be the turning point in the mother’s life; it is what makes her want to participate in a trial period of this new chipping technology.  The chip embedded in the child’s head can show her location, her vitals (gluclose, iron, triglycerides, electrolytes, cholesterol, white and red blood cell count, and lipids), and her optic relay.  She can also control her child’s optic relay if she is witnessing something her mother does not want her to.  The way the filter on her optic relay works if it is turned on is if her cortical levels rise, then the image and sounds causing it are blocked and muted. The first time the mother decides to use the filter function is to block out a dog barking while they are on a walk. This type of surveillance causes a problem very quickly after it is turned on.   The grandfather falls down while the mother is not there and needs help. Because her filter is on at this time, the daughter cannot hear him asking for help and asking for a phone. After this event happens, her mother seems to always have her daughter’s optic relay playing on her tablet so that she can always see what she sees, even when she is only thirty feet away. 

The daughter grows up a little and is now in elementary school; her filter is still turned on.  She cannot hear the violent stories her friends tell her and cannot clearly see the fight videos they try to show her.  Later when she is home, she tries to draw her own picture of what she imagines to be a bleeding person.  When the colored pencil blood in her drawing starts being filtered too, she decides to try to feel it for herself and actually stabs herself in the fingers repeatedly with a pencil.  Even in the daughter’s therapy session the mother watches her optic relay, and sees that she cannot tell the difference between people talking and people fighting because she has never seen people fight.  The mother realizes it was a mistake to filter her from so much and turns it off. On the daughter’s first day without the filter, the barking dog from the beginning scares her when she walks by, her friend at school shows her porn and violent movies, and she sees an injury for the first time.  We see her age all the way from elementary school to high school without using the filtering system.  At this age, her mom calls her a few times but does not get an answer so she fires up her magical tablet for the first time in years.  She sees that her daughter is having sex through her optic relay. Because she has the system turned on again and is worried, she watches her optic relay often and she sees her daughter do cocaine too.  She then goes back through her daughter’s memories, which is a huge step over her daughter’s boundaries.  She threatens her daughter’s boyfriend and makes him break up with her because of the drugs.  Her mother even sees that her daughter is pregnant based on her vitals and sneaks an emergency contraceptive into her food without telling her.  When the daughter realizes what happened she searches the house for the tablet.  When she finds it, she sees how much her mother has been seeing and she packs up all of her things to run away.  The daughter is obviously angered and tries to turn the tablet off when her mother gets home.  Because she is frustrated and flustered and does not know how to use it, she ends up turning her filter back on by accident. Sheis so enraged she beats her mother with the tablet.  She does not see how much physical damage she causes her mother until the filter is turned back off.  The daughter runs away and the tablet dies.  Her mother has lost her completely.  

The daughter missed a lot of important things in life and therefore did not understand a lot of real-life lessons she could have gotten if she had not had a filter on her life for years.  Violating the daughter’s privacy as a young adult is what urges her to hurt her mother.  This is an example of individuals using surveillance and it causing problems.  However, personal issues are not the only ones that can arise from overuse of surveillance technology.

Black Mirror and Surveillance Technology

There are many possible risks with surveillance technology in the future. One cultural production that shows examples of how is an episode of the Netflix show Black Mirror called“Arkangel” (2017).  This particular episode clearly presents how surveillance technology could possibly go too far and cause a lot of problems.  Overstepping surveillance boundaries could become catastrophic.  “Arkangel” is mainly focused on parental surveillance issues, but if someone can see as much as the parent in this show sees, then the government can probably see it too.  Government surveillance is an important topic to talk about because it is already becoming an issue regarding smart devices and technology and not a lot of people are very informed about the problem.  How far have we as humans come with surveillance technology and at what point will people start resenting it?  The government is starting to put surveillance on everything and it is a collective fear that they will end up going too far, if they haven’t already.