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In today’s media world, original works without inspiration from a previous work are nearly impossible to find. Every episode of Black Mirror is jaw-dropping in its own unique fashion, but while seemingly unprecedented each one may be the differences may merely be in the subject matter, slight plot or production alterations.

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Overprotective Parents in Arkangel

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This article is a recap of Black Mirror's season four episode "Arkangel."It contains spoilers and discussion regarding the episode's plot.
Some Black Mirror episodes take place in a world so far-flung from our own that they're much easier to digest as science fiction fantasies. Other times, they feel more adjacent to reality, delivering dire warnings of technology run amok in fallible hands.

"Arkangel" belongs more in the latter camp, telling a contained story about a small family that slowly disintegrates. Its Black Mirror "twist" hinges on an advanced chip technology that, when inserted into a child's brain, can provide anxious parents with everything from their vitals to their fear levels to their literal vision. Any parent who chooses to use this "Arkangel" chip can monitor everything their child is feeling, and even put parental controls on what she's seeing, with a casual swipe on their designated tablet.

In the hands of a nervous single mom (Rosemarie DeWitt), Arkangel becomes a digital umbilical cord she refuses to release for fear of losing her daughter forever. UsingArkangel becomes like reading a diary, but instead, she's reading her daughter.

Not many details about "Arkangel" would have to change in order to make it work outside the sci-fi faux realities Black Mirror creates. While most every Black Mirror episode takes care to extrapolate technological nightmares based on developments firmly rooted in reality, "Arkangel" leans on a conceit that's so close to our existing world that it's about as low-key as Black Mirror can get without being ... well, our existing world.

Much of what the Arkangel chip entails essentially makes it a smartphone that someone figured out how to shrink and insert into a human body. With its GPS tracker and vital sign scanning, it's a shortcut for parents who don't know how to hack their kids' phones but totally would if they could.

In this respect, so much of "Arkangel" plays out like it is, in fact, just a story of a protective mom hacking her daughter's phone with increasingly disastrous consequences. We see how Arkangel affects both mother and daughter as Sarah grows from a wide-eyed toddler to a curious child to a restless teenager trying to make up for lost time. Jodie Foster's direction is generally stark and matter-of-fact, only asserting itself when Sarah or her mother is in a particular state of panic, the camera switching to handheld in order to capture their confused and rapidly fracturing relationship to each other and the world around them.

While Arkangel at first seems like a boon to the family, it quickly becomes an easy way for Sarah's mother to jump to the worst conclusions. It doesn't soothe her nerves; it spikes them.

This surveillance side of the story is not, unfortunately, all that riveting. But there is one aspect of the Arkangel chip that is genuinely fascinating - so much so that the episode might have been better off focusing on it alone instead of muddling it togetherwith everything else Arkangel can do.

Arkangel's "parental control" is its most layered and ultimately disturbing feature

The most overtly science fiction innovation of the Arkangel chip is that it allows usersto turn on a "parental control" feature that activates any time it senses a spike in the child's fear levels. When activated, a friendly Arkangel nurse tells Sarah's mother toward the beginning of the episode, the child's vision will automatically blur out the upsetting image in question.

The nurse demonstrates this by showing Sarah a violent scene in a movie, which Sarah's vision quickly contorts, rendering the image of a soldier emptying her machine gun as a benign series of geometric patterns. When they go home, Sarah and her mom walk by the hyperactive German shepherd who used to scare them every day, but this time, he becomes that weird blob of shapes, undulating pleasantly as they pass.

But as Sarah grows up, this feature becomes not just a bug but a danger to both her and the people she loves: When her grandfather collapses while they're painting together, Arkangel blurs his broken body so that Sarah can finish her painting in peace.

As she gets older, Sarah's childhood of constant surveillance and hardships smoothed out into pleasant nothings catches up with her, making her an object of curiosity on a playground full of kids who grew up discovering their messy world at the click of a button. Sarah is safe, but she's also a benign zombie who needs the concept of blood explained to her ("like juice, but thicker"). Frustrated and confused, she stabs herself with a pencil, trying desperately to see the blood that keeps blurring before her eyes.

At this point, Sarah's mother decides to shut off Arkangel, terrified of where it could go. In one of the episode's most memorable sequences, Foster keeps the camera trained on a shot of Sarah passing that German shepherd, over and over again, getting older and more confident with every pass.

But Sarah's Arkangel-less life only lasts until she becomes a teenager and starts indulging classic teenage pastimes like lying, drinking, and sneaking around to see the charismatic bad boy who once told her what blood is. When she fails to come home by curfew one night, her mother frantically plugs Arkangel back in to find out where she could've gone - and ends up recoiling in horror as she sees her daughter losing her virginity from Sarah's own perspective.

From there, things quickly and irrevocably devolve. By the episode's end, a furious and confused Sarah has smashed the Arkangel tablet over her mother's head, over and over again. As the tablet breaks and Sarah's rage grows, her mother's bloodied head goes in and out of focus, as if neither Sarah nor the chip in her head can decide whether she should see it. Soon enough, the tablet is broken beyond repair - and her mother might be too, once she realizes that Sarah's made a break for it with a packed duffel bag, to go discover the world by herself for the first time in her heavily controlled life.

The moments when Sarah tries desperately to understand a world that's been long shielded from her, as her mother tries desperately to let her without panicking, are the moments when "Arkangel" hits hardest. The question of how much children can - or should - see of a world that is available with an instantaneous Google search is one that parents grapple with every day, without any sort of conclusive answer. What "Arkangel" suggests is that shielding them entirely from the truth is nothing but a temporary salve, keeping right in line with Black Mirror' s overall ethos that pretty much everything we try in the name of protecting ourselves and each other will eventually, inevitably backfire.

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Black Mirror's "Arkangel" takes parental surveillance to its darkest, most obvious extreme

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Directed by Jodie Foster, the episode makes a living nightmare out of parental controls.

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Black Mirror Explained: A Shared Universe

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Ambiguity

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Charlie Brooker explains the ambiguous 'Smithereens' ending in Black Mirror season 5...

Black Mirror fans are so shook by the 'Smithereens' ending that many of them are calling it the greatest Black Mirror episode of all time. Now Black Mirror creator Charlie Brooker has explained season 5, episode 2.
Every hidden easter egg and reference you missed in Black Mirror season 5
'Smithereens' stars Andrew Scott ( Sherlock, Fleabag) as Chris and Damson Idris ( Snowfall, The Twilight Zone) as Jaden. In it, we find out that Chris is working as a cab driver. Chris picks up Jaden and, after finding out that Jaden works for a company called 'Smithereen', he holds him hostage. The episode then becomes increasingly tense, as the police get involved and it becomes clear what Chris' motives are. 'Smithereens' ends with one of them dying but it's unclear who dies.

Who died in in Black Mirror Season 5 episode 2? 'Smithereens' ending explained

Black Mirror season 5: Smithereens ending explained. Picture: Netflix

Midway through 'Smithereens', we learn that Chris lost his fiancé a few years before in a drink driving accident. However, at the end of the episode, it's revealed that the accident wasn't a drunk driver's fault. It happened because Chris took his eye off of the road and looked at a notification from the Smithereen social media app on his phone. Chris kidnapped Jaden, in the hopes that he would be able to talk to the Smithereen CEO Billy Bauer.

Holding Jaden at gun point, Chris eventually talks to Billy via phone and tells him how harmful his company is. He asks Billy to stop making Smithereen so addictive and explains how he lost his fiancée. All the while, the police have surrounded Chris' car and are preparing to shoot him. After Chris speaks to Billy, he offers to let Jaden out of his car and reveals that he intends to kill himself. Jaden tries to stop him and the police shoot.

However, it's unclear if the police shoot Jaden by accident, the two of them, or Chris as intended. The screen then cuts to various onlooker's reacting to what happened, before showing Billy seeing a notification about it and then random people seemingly receiving notifications about the incident on their phones. The reactions are so ambiguous that there isn't a concrete revelation as to who dies.

How does Charlie Brooker explain the ending?

I just came back after watching Smithereens and immediately checked social media.
Then it hit me.
Fuck.
Too Real
Black Mirror well done
- aniara (@rxtian_dee) June 5, 2019

The point of #Smithereens ending was to make it ambiguous enough so that the viewers first instinct was to check online what happened. And for a brief moment they unknowingly become a part of the montage of people wt the obsession to feed their curiosity online. I fell for it. pic.twitter.com/U1LUq8y7xP
- Anjo (@RicoTonkatsu) June 5, 2019

Discussing the ending with Den of Geek, Charlie Brooker said: "No it was always deliberately an ambiguous ending, in that instead what we show is it rippling out and becoming a piece of confetti in people's lives on their timelines that they sort of glance at it, and then put it away. That was always in there and that seemed like the best ending." The most memorable event in the protagonists' lives is just a notification in others.

Mind blowing, right? If that weren't enough, viewers are suggesting that the ending is so ambiguous because it then makes us want to check social media to find out who actually died. By ending like that, it asks us to question how addicted we are to our phones and if we're so obsessed that someone we love could hurt, like Chris' fiancée did.

Okay. Bye. Never using my phone, social media or the internet again.

What did you think of the Smithereens ending?

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People are calling 'Smithereens' the "greatest" 'Black Mirror' episode of all time

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Charlie Brooker explains the ambiguous 'Smithereens' ending in Black Mirror season 5... Black Mirror fans are so shook by the 'Smithereens' ending that many of them are calling it the greatest Black Mirror episode of all time. Now Black Mirror creator Charlie Brooker has explained season 5, episode 2.

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Pseudo-individuality

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On popular music: I. The musical material

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The first part of Adorno's lengthy essay on popular music, published in 1941 (written with the assistence of George Simpson).

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Social Media and Black Mirror

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The Twilight Zone Comparison

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Meanwhile, electricity and electric light have erased the night sky from our consciousness while creating a 24/7 civilization that spans the planet and gives off a glow visible from space. And our satellites and media technologies have connected our peoples and nations around the world, ensuring that our world remains aglow on our screens, too. The consequence is more than mere global warming and climate change, because we humans have effected the Anthropocene, the new epoch of planetary evolution caused by the "great acceleration" of technological civilization since the middle of the 20th century.

The Twilight Zone appeared as television, consumer society, and the great acceleration began to change the planet. Black Mirror is smack in the middle of the Anthropocene and the proliferation of technologies. Implicit in both series is the idea that our technology and civilization have evolved far faster than our species, leaving our brains the challenge of making sense of the world in which we can peer to the edge of the universe, drop nukes on the other side of Earth, and trash talk on Twitter and Facebook. We are primates in search of a philosophy, knowing we are trapped in old worldviews and superstitions, yet fantasizing that futuristic superheroes can save us. The Twilight Zone and Black Mirror show the need for new philosophies, new worldviews, and new modes of being, yet Serling and Brooker alike leave us trapped with no one to save us but ourselves.

What does it mean to be human? Can we save ourselves? These are questions that have challenged humanity since the first petroglyphs and cave paintings. These are also two of the questions posed in episodes of The Twilight Zone and Black Mirror.

Across the millennia, the question of human identity has grown ever more complex, precisely the effects of Galileo, Darwin, and the rise of modern technological civilization. Galileo yanked us off the center stage of the cosmos, showing we were not the center of the universe, while Darwin showed we are one species that has evolved along with all the other species on Earth. Modern technological civilization has increased our life spans, enabled material comfort and consumer abundance, and extended our technologies around the planet and deep into our bodies and the universe. Billions of people live their lives in sprawling electrified metropolises, going to and from work, raising families, cheering on their favorite teams, gazing upon stars and celebrities, and enjoying art and entertainment - all with most of each and every day spent staring at electronic rectangles.

We now live in a society of ever-evolving views of human identity, constant planetary surveillance via satellites and social media, and the endless events of the spectacle and hyperreal playing our on screens and streets. We can make copies of copies of copies of our lives, organize and archive it all in digital databases ready to be mined as needed - and in so doing, perform the very behaviors that raise questions of privacy, authenticity and autonomy. We live in a world where technology is our total mode of existence and aesthetic experience is deeply woven into the fabric of everyday life.

The beautiful and the sublime are daily experiences in the spectacle and our metropolises, yet we cannot seem to imagine a future that is not naively nostalgic or hopelessly dystopian. This is the very world of Black Mirror, yet these themes and issues were first presented in The Twilight Zone. The following six themes outline the structure of Black Mirror and Critical Media Theory. Because the contributors drafted their chapters before the Fourth Season was released, these chapters are not included in the body of the book. However, we provide analyses of season four episodes, through the lenses of this book's six themes, in the conclusion.

As consumer society and television spread in the 1950s and 1960s, several episodes of The Twilight Zone addressed issues of human identity and authenticity.[1] Similarly, Black Mirror deals with human identity in "Fifteen Million Merits," "The Entire History of You," "Be Right Back," "White Christmas," and "San Junipero."

The surveillance culture of The Twilight Zone era is nowhere near as pervasive as it is now, yet Rod Serling and the series did address surveillance-related issues of paranoia, totalitarianism, and enforced conformity.[2] Of course, Black Mirror offers masterful takes on surveillance in several other episodes: "The Entire History of You," "White Bear," and "Hated in the Nation," among others.

The Twilight Zone explored the early effects of the spectacle and hyperreality in episodes that dealt with robots, cloning, simulation, and the realms of movies and theme parks.[3] In the spectacle, life becomes a mediated experience where images become the top commodity. Hyperreality takes it further, where the signs and symbols of the real replace the real, where the maps overtake the territories they represent. Black Mirror tackles the ramped up 21st century spectacle and hyperreality in numerous episodes, most notably "National Anthem," "Fifteen Million Merits," "The Waldo Moment," "Be Right Back," and "Nosedive."

Often overlooked in The Twilight Zone is the role of its overall worldview. Appearing during the peak of Sartre's fame and influence, The Twilight Zone's aesthetic is deeply existential - it repeatedly suggests we inhabit a vast impersonal metropolises and perhaps a meaningless universe in which there is no exit.[4] These sensibilities are embedded in the ambience and atmosphere of most episodes. We must face the consequences of the choices we make and world we inhabit. Unable to face reality or handle the society in which they are trapped, the characters experience alienation, loneliness, and even abject terror. We see the same experiences in numerous episodes of Black Mirror, especially in "White Christmas."

The Twilight Zone and Black Mirror deal with issues involving technology and existence, especially how it shapes daily life in our civilization and the evolution of warfare. For example, The Twilight Zone featured episodes that related to cultural acceleration and deceleration as well as the destruction of nuclear warfare.Similarly, Black Mirror features numerous episodes dealing with technological existence and current warfare, such as "Men Against Fire" and "Most Hated in Nation."

That we can make better copies of humans, but not necessarily better humans, and still cannot imagine an end to warfare among our tribes and nations is central to why we seem trapped in the dystopian futures presented in The Twilight Zone and BlackMirror. In fact, both seem to suggest there is no way out of our dilemma. For those seeking refuge against a dystopian future, The Twilight Zone warned viewers about the illusory nature of nostalgia for retreats into the past, such as small towns, quaint villages, or idyllic Edens.[5] Black Mirror is also skeptical of an non-dystopian future in most of its episodes, yet in "San Junipero" it offers hope for eternal love in a romanticized vision of the 1980s - stored and simulated in a computer of the future.

Art, science, and technology continue to rapidly evolve and expand into the future. Medical science offers amazing breakthroughs and treatments on a daily basis, while travel technology sends products and people all over the world. Global trade and tourism are steadily expanding. We see an explosion of artistic creativity as wealth increases in many nations around the world. Amid our technological civilization, human identity remains as complex as ever, still too often bound up in unscientific beliefs and traditionalist ideologies such as racism, tribalism, and nationalism, hence the building of walls and homeland security states. Gender norms are expanding along with the cultural acceptance of increasing diversity of sexual preferences, all countered by envy from the uptight, wed to sacred texts.

Despite the recent political controversies centered on Cambridge Analytica's use of Facebook data to target and manipulate voters in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, the planetary surveillance systems are continuing to permeate every aspect of daily existence. Terrified from 24/7 news updates, parents fear for their children's safety and place them under ever more surveillance. In the cities and suburbs, "free range" children are an endangered species, now permanently linked to their parents via social media and mobile phones - the very condition displayed in "Arkangel," in season four of Black Mirror.

In the future, if our Facebook memories are directly downloaded from our brains, then police detectives might well piece together unsolved crimes as shown in the "Crocodile." But any benefit to law and order will be outweighed by the horrific use of uploaded and downloaded memories shown in "Black Museum," truly one of the terrifying futures presented in Black Mirror.

If is it not drones surveilling us and hunting us down as in "Most Hated in the Nation," then it might be the dogs of "Metalhead." Black Mirror 's drone bees and robot dogs draw upon recent trends of weaponizing objects of nature for deployment against humans, in what can only be a dystopian future.

Like surveillance culture, the spectacle and hyperreality are the dominant modes of determining what counts as true, good, beautiful, and meaningful. Copies of copies of copies are everywhere, big data is piling up in servers dotting our lands and migrating to the North Pole in search of cooler temperatures. But that does not mean we cannot find love as we transform the planet. Season four of Black Mirror offers some future optimism in the episode "Hang the DJ" - where big data is shown to produce true love via a computer dating system that merges Tinder and Match.com.

Our screens are our maps, the maps of our consciousness for 10-14 hours a day, the maps that have replaced and shaped the territories they are supposed to represent. Everywhere we turn, the signs and symbols of the real stand in for the real, apparently too unbearable, too degraded, or too boring in comparison to the artificial selves and glorious worlds on our screens, always aglow like Las Vegas. It is undeniable that a reality-TV star is the president of the United States, continuing the downward entertainment trajectory from B-movie star (Ronald Reagan) to baseball team owner (George W. Bush) to Twitter tough guy as "leader of the free world." Given the techno-cultural trends impacting the brains of our species, Donald Trump is not the bottom and neither is "The Waldo Moment." Since our glowing cities block out the stars, and NASA has no plans of sending humans to deep space, virtual reality and hyperreality will be the best option for those seeking to explore (copies of) the cosmos, as long as you do not get trapped on the "USS Callister."

With consumer culture reigning supreme and the Anthropocene in effect around the planet, the lands and oceans seem doomed to evermore pillaging and pollution. No wonder so many fantasize about the off-world destinies in Interstellar, The Martian, and Star Wars. After all, Elon Musk claims our new future is back in outer space, where we are supposedly destined to terraform Mars into a suburb of Earth. The space visions are meant to symbolize optimistic futures for humanity, yet that seems far-fetched considering the United States, China, and Russia are busy weaponizing space. That we cannot imagine a utopian or war-free future in space is why the "USS Callister" is such a powerful and symbolic story. There is no Captain Kirk or Spock to save our technological existence.

Ironically, it is the concept of exploring space that poetically connects Black Mirror to its fractured mirror origins in The Twilight Zone and its pilot episode entitled "Where Is Everybody?" The episode opens with a man (Earl Holliman) walking on a dirt road and into a small town. Wearing a one-piece jumpsuit that is modestly futuristic, the man enters a café. Store windows are full of goods, the coffee is hot in the café, and the ice cream is cold in the general store.

But, there is not a human in sight. In the general store, the man sees a bookstand filled with multiple copies of a paperback entitled The Last Man on Earth. The headline on the back cover says: "Don't Be Half a Man." Don't be half a human. Is this not the subtext for Bing's actions in "Fifteen Million Merits," for the relations between Martha and Ash in "Be Right Back," and for the Prime Minister in "National Anthem?"

By the evening, the solitary man ventures into a movie theater. A war movie is playing and it shows a B-52 bomber taking off and coming right toward him. The man realizes he is in the United States Air Force. That explains the jumpsuit. He says to himself: "That must have been it. A bomb. But if there was a bomb, everything would be destroyed. And nothing is destroyed." Panicked, he questions the very nature of reality. He runs down the theater stairs and crashes into his reflection in a wall-sized mirror, fracturing the glass in a strange anticipation of Black Mirror 's opening.

After running wildly through the town at night, he screams repeatedly, "Help me! Somebody help me! Somebody is watching me! Help me!" It seems there is no one to save him, not unlike Victoria in "White Bear," Potter and Matt in "White Christmas," all the victims in "Most Hated in the Nation," and various characters in other Black Mirror episodes.

The final scene cuts to a U.S. military facility, where we learn the man is inside an isolation chamber with electrodes taped to his head and connected to a machine. He was in the box for 484 hours, in a "simulated trip to the moon," for the purpose of testing the effects of extended isolation on astronauts who will take real trips to the moon. But he "cracked up" inside the virtual reality simulation, resembling that of "Men Against Fire" and "Playtest."

The military officials declare the man's test a success, despite his crack up:
"You see, we can feed the stomach with concentrates. We can supply microfilm for reading, recreation, even movies of a sort. We pump oxygen in and waste material out. But there is one thing we can't simulate. That's a very basic need: man's hunger for companionship. The barrier of loneliness - that's one thing we haven't licked, yet."
Serling's voice-over concludes the episode:
Up there, up there in the vastness of space, in the void that is sky, up there is an enemy known as isolation. It sits there in the stars waiting, waiting with the patience of eons, forever waiting in the Twilight Zone.
Like The Twilight Zone, Black Mirror has not been naïve about our future in space. The only ones who can save us are ourselves on planet Earth as we confront the existential conditions and dystopian futures of The Twilight Zone and Black Mirror.

Despite the optimistic cheerleading of Elon Musk, space is not a plausible Plan B for our ongoing failures on Earth. Aside from the issues of isolation and loneliness, no human is going to Mars anytime soon because NASA scientists have yet to figure out how to prevent radiation damage caused by long-term exposure to cosmic rays. Yet, as suggested by Black Mirror, and the advances in fields like virtual reality and gaming, we can venture into outer space with our headsets and powerful detailed maps of the cosmos. And once there we might find ourselves on-board the "USS Callister" with a demented wannabe Captain Kirk, creating a dystopian space future for those trapped on Earth, witnessing The Twilight Zone and Black Mirror unfold right before our eyes. The enemy will not be aliens. It will be us, staring at our solitary reflections in our black mirrors.

--------------------------------

[1] All episodes are listed by season and number, Internet Movie Database. Episodes dealing with themes of identity and authenticity included "Sixteen Millimeter Shrine" (1.4), "The Lonely" (1.7), "Mirror Image" (1.21), and "The After Hours" (1.34). Episodes about the power and magic radio and television included "Static" (2.20) and "What's in the Box" (5.24).

[2] Suburban paranoia: "The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street" (1.22) and "The Shelter" (3.3). Totalitarianism: "Eye of the Beholder" (2.6) and "The Obsolete Man" (2.29). Conformity: "Eye of the Beholder" (2.6) and "Number 12 Looks Just Like You" (5.17).

[3] Episodes dealing with robots, cloning, and simulated humans included "The Lonely" (1.7), "The Lateness of the Hour" (2.8), "The Trade-Ins" (3.31), "I Sing the Body Electric" (3.35), "In His Image" (4.1), and "Number 12 Looks Just Like You" (5.17). Episodes dealing with simulated realities included "Elegy" (1.20), "A World of Difference" (1.23), and "Stopover in a Quiet Town" (5.30).

[4] Cultural acceleration and deceleration: "The Odyssey of Flight 33" (2.18) and "A Kind of Stopwatch" (5.4). Nuclear apocalypse: "Time Enough at Last" (1.8), "Third from the Sun" (1.14), "Two" (3.1), "The Midnight Sun" (3.10), and "The Old Man in the Cave" (5.7).

[5] Episodes dealing with Edens, villages, and small towns included "Walking Distance" (1.5), "A Stop at Willoughby" (1.30), "It's a Good Life" (3.8), and "Probe 7, Over and Out" (5.9).

__________________________

Written for fans or college classrooms, this is the first collection of essays about Black Mirror. With authors from ten nations and three continents, this is a truly international collection that explores Black Mirror episodes from multiple perspectives.

Available in hardcover in Amazon or at Lexington Books website. Hopefully, the softcover will follow.

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Black Mirror: The Twilight Zone of the 21st Century

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Meanwhile, electricity and electric light have erased the night sky from our consciousness while creating a 24/7 civilization that spans the planet and gives off a glow visible from space. And our satellites and media technologies have connected our peoples and nations around the world, ensuring that our world remains aglow on our screens, too.

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Social Media & Addiction

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The use of social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Tinder has become the cornerstone of modern communication and connection as it allows users to create a sense of belonging and redefine their way of being. Despite the many positive benefits and impacts of these sites, the recent Cambridge Analytica scandal has reignited discussions about the place of social media and social networking sites in our lives.

From a mental health perspective, concerns have been raised about the negative impact of excessive use of social networking sites on the health and wellbeing of users, especially that of young people, who are enthusiastic users of this technology. Back in 2011, Dr. Daria Kuss and I were the first academics to systematically review the scientific literature on excessive social media use. Although there were few studies at the time, we did find that for a small minority of individuals there was a significant detrimental effect on many aspects of their life, including their real life relationships and academic achievement among those still in education. We argued that such signs are indicative of addiction.

Over the past five years there has been a proliferation of studies assessing how excessive social media use can impact negatively on health. In a recent paper Dr. Kuss and I again reviewed the latest research on the topic and showed that social media use for a minority of individuals is associated with a number of psychological problems, including anxiety, depression, loneliness, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, and addiction. Because social media is most frequently accessed via smartphones, their usage is intimately intertwined and their mobile nature contributes to excessive checking habits, which often derives from what is commonly labelled as the ' fear of missing out ' (FOMO).

The good news is that very few people are genuinely addicted to social media. However, many people's social media use is habitual and it can start to spill over into other areas of their lives and be problematic and dangerous, such as checking social media while driving. Other behaviors may be annoying rather than dangerous, but may be indicative of problematic social media use, such as checking social media while eating out with friends or constantly checking your smartphone while watching a movie at the cinema. Others may snub social contact with their loved ones or friends and prefer to check out social media on their smartphone instead (so-called ' phubbing ').

If you want to check whether you may be at risk of developing an addiction to social media, ask yourselves these six simple questions:

Do you spend a lot of time thinking about social media or planning to use social media?
Do you feel urges to use social media more and more?
Do you use social media to forget about personal problems?
Do you often try to reduce your use of social media without success?
Do you become restless or troubled if you are unable to use social media?
Do you use social media so much that it has had a negative impact on your job or studies?

If the answer to all six of these questions is "yes," then you may have or be developing an addiction to using social media. We say "may" because the only way this can be confirmed is through a diagnosis from a clinical psychologist or a psychiatrist.

If you answered "yes" to a few of these questions, it is more likely that you are a habitual social media user and that what you should do is engage in 'digital detox' strategies that simply allow you to reduce the amount of time spent on social media. This can include simple steps, such as turning off sound notifications and only allowing yourself to check your smartphone every 30 minutes or once an hour. Other simple steps include having periods in the day where there is self-imposed non- screen time (such as during meal times) and leaving your smartphone in a separate room from where you sleep (just so you don't get the urge to check social media before bedtime, during the night, and when you wake up).

At a societal level, steps need to be taken by governments or organizations to help minimize and (in some cases) prohibit the use of mobile devices. Some such steps are in place in many countries, such as the banning of smartphone use while driving. Given the loss of productivity in both the workplace and educational settings, employers, schools, and colleges need policies in place to ensure that individuals are focused on what they should be doing. Many schools ban the use of smartphones in the classroom. Prohibition in other contexts such as workplace settings may also be justified if it is practical to do so. Some restaurants are now providing discounts on food bills if customers refrain from using their smartphones during their meal. These positive reinforcement strategies may well be the way forward in trying to decrease time spent on smartphones checking social media.

Digital literacy and awareness of the effects of excessive social media use need to be embedded with work and educational settings. More controversially, social media operators (such as Facebook) could start using their behavioral data to identify excessive users and provide strategies to limit time spent on their products. This is already being used in the online gambling industry and could easily be applied by social networking sites.

For the small number of individuals that are genuinely addicted to social media use, treatment is warranted. However, the goal of treatment for this type of addiction (unlike many other addictions) should be controlled use rather than total abstinence, as it is not feasible to stop someone from using devices that have Internet access (i.e., their smartphone). The most successful type of treatment for online addictions appears to be cognitive behavioral therapy (which is a talk therapy designed to help people change the way they think and behave), although there are relatively few published studies examining its efficacy in relation to internet addictions. Other more specific ways of how to treat individuals with excessive and addictive Internet use, including social media use, have also been outlined elsewhere.

When it comes to solving the problem of reducing individuals' use of social media there is no magic bullet. While individuals are ultimately responsible for their own social media use, policymakers, social media operators, employers, and educational establishments all need to play their part in reducing excessive social media use.

(Please note, this article was written with Dr. Daria Kuss and was the original extended version of an article that was subsequently published in The Washington Post)
References and further reading
Andreassen, C.S., Billieux, J., Griffiths, M.D., Kuss, D.J., Demetrovics, Z., Mazzoni, E. & Pallesen, S. (2016). The relationship between addictive use of social media and video games and symptoms of psychiatric disorders: A large-scale cross-sectional study. Psychology of Addictive Behaviors, 30, 252-262.

Andreassen, C.S., Pallesen, S., Griffiths, M.D. (2017). The relationship between excessive online social networking, narcissism, and self-esteem: Findings from a large national survey. Addictive Behaviors, 64, 287-293.

Chotpitayasunondh, V., & Douglas, K. M. (2016). How "phubbing" becomes the norm: The antecedents and consequences of snubbing via smartphone. Computers in Human Behavior, 63, 9-18.

Griffiths, M.D., Kuss, D.J. & Demetrovics, Z. (2014). Social networking addiction: An overview of preliminary findings. In K. Rosenberg & L. Feder (Eds.), Behavioral Addictions: Criteria, Evidence and Treatment (pp.119-141). New York: Elsevier.

Kuss, D.J. & Griffiths, M.D. (2011). Online social networking and addiction: A literature review of empirical research. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 8, 3528-3552.

Kuss, D.J. & Griffiths, M.D. (2017). Social networking sites and addiction: Ten lessons learned. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 14, 311; doi:10.3390/ijerph14030311

Pontes, H.M., Kuss, D.J. & Griffiths, M.D. (2015). The clinical psychology of Internet addiction: A review of its conceptualization, prevalence, neuronal processes, and implications for treatment. Neuroscience and Neuroeconomics, 4, 11-23.

Przybylski, A. K., Murayama, K., DeHaan, C. R., & Gladwell, V. (2013). Motivational, emotional, and behavioral correlates of fear of missing out. Computers in Human Behavior, 29(4), 1841-1848.

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The use of social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Tinder has become the cornerstone of modern communication and connection as it allows users to create a sense of belonging and redefine their way of being.

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Black Mirror in China

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The 21st century is a great time to be alive. We drive electric cars, we're curing diseases with CRISPR, and we'll soon be returning to the moon in rockets more reusable than the Space Shuttle ever was.

But it's not all silicon and sunshine - our future has a healthy dose of "Black Mirror," thanks to a slew of technologies that are downright creepy. Some of these technologies seem promising but can be easily perverted in frightening ways. Others seem to serve no purpose other than to creep us out.

Here are the 11 technologies that are so creepy they're keeping tech experts and futurists awake at night.

Deepfakes - a notorious technology that uses artificial intelligence and deep learning to seamlessly replace faces in a video - have some superficially beneficial applications. But on the whole, it's not just creepy, but existentially terrifying. Imagine being able to swap one person's face onto another person's body in full, high-resolution video.

Aaron Lawson, a scientist at SRI International's Speech Technology and Research Laboratory, said this may lead to political instability and chaos as people lose faith in media. "It's going to lead to confusion about basic reality and encourage a sense that truth is just your opinion, based on the assumption that everything has been faked," Lawson said.

Self-driving cars

We were promised cars, but it looks increasingly what we're really getting is self-driving cars. Already, some cars on the road have autopilot or drive-assist modes that can handle common driving situations. Can they drive more safely on average than humans? Arguably, yes - especially over time, as carmakers learn from past mistakes and vast volumes of real-world driving data.

"There will certainly be unintended consequences we have not thought through," Vescent said.

Smart baby monitors

Smart baby monitors are a part of the emerging Internet of Things, and they're welcomed by many parents because they allow you to see, hear, and talk to your baby from anywhere in the house.

"Someone speaking to your child and asking them to open a door or a window or go to a particular place is probably the worst that could happen with this type of technology," said Donata Kalnenaite, futurist and president of Termageddon.

Brain-computer interfaces

Once the stuff of science fiction, sophisticated brain-computer interfaces (BCI) are becoming a reality. And like many of the leading technologies in the news, this one is also being developed by real-world Tony Stark, Elon Musk.

is working to develop high-bandwidth implantable computer interfaces that will allow doctors to restore sensory and motor function in people who are severely disabled through strokes and other neurological disorders. But of course, it won't end there. Once BCI technology advances far enough, Musk hopes it can be used to enhance ordinary human brain function with better memory and cognitive abilities, as human brains and artificial intelligence merge.

The very concept might sound creepy to some, but there are even more distressing implications.

"It opens our bodies to an unknown amount of threats. Eventually, this technology may present an opportunity for people to be hacked into, and that control could be all-encompassing - physical, mental, and emotional," Hypergiant CEO Ben Lamm told Business Insider.

De-pixelating pixelated images

We're used to seeing pixelation used to mask faces, license plates, and secure undisclosed locations, so much so that we intuitively know that a pixelated image is intended to protect someone or something's identity. Pixelation works for the very reason that the "sharpen and enhance" trope on television - if something is pixelated, there isn't enough information to refine it into a sharp, identifiable image.

"This means that the most vulnerable people whose faces must be protected from publicity can't in fact be protected at all, Kovarik told Business Insider.

Sophisticated robots

Some science fiction tropes are iconic. The robot apocalypse, for example, which has fueled six "Terminator" movies and a TV series so far, relies on robots that hunt down humans.

With that image burned into the collective consciousness, you might think that robotics companies would avoid creating robots that look like they're a few iterations from killbot, but that's not the way Boston Dynamics rolls.

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The 11 creepiest technologies that exist today

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The 21st century is a great time to be alive. We drive electric cars, we're curing diseases with CRISPR, and we'll soon be returning to the moon in rockets more reusable than the Space Shuttle ever was.

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Social Media Prisoners

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Alright let's be serious.

Smithereens was actually really well done. Simply because of that ending.

A pivotal moment in a select group of people's lives, but a quick news update and nothing changes.

Think about it this way. You're an active participant/bystander of Columbine or Virginia Tech. You're in the "shit". Your life is potentially on the line.

People are tweeting about it.

But after all is said and done and you've survived, it'll be the most traumatic moment of your life involving numerous counseling sessions. However, to outsiders it was just a status update on Twitter. People have moved to the next meme or story.

Your life doesn't matter to them.

You are the hostage.

This subreddit is like every other person who glances and moves on.

Just think about that.

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Smithereens is more powerful than you think

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Alright let's be serious. Smithereens was actually really well done. Simply because of that ending. A pivotal moment in a select group of people's lives, but a quick news update and nothing changes. Think about it this way. You're an active participant/bystander of Columbine or Virginia Tech. You're in the "shit".

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A Dystopian Reflection

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A fourth season of "Black Mirror" crept onto Netflix in late December and began to squirm through viewers' heads already dizzy with the exhaust fumes of the outgoing year. The six roomy new episodes of Charlie Brooker's anthology series play like a Rod Serling snack pack of dreadful speculation. The season tells tales of love in the age of asexual reproduction, about lives patterned by artificial intelligence, and about consciousness as a carceral state.

From 2011, when the first season of "Black Mirror" aired on Britain's Channel 4, the show has figured media culture as a site of thorough depravity. In the conceptually perfect début, a Prime Minister of the United Kingdom is obliged, by kidnappers holding a princess hostage, to fornicate with a pig on film. The man behind the monstrosity turns out to be an artist bent on illustrating the evil of screen-culture circuses. In the following episode, Daniel Kaluuya plays a prole who, like all members of a teeming class that unavoidably consumes omnipresent junk culture, works a daily shift to earn his keep by pedalling a stationary bicycle to generate power. The character spends his nest egg to pay the fee for a pretty girl with a lovely voice to enter a reality show. On air, she is systematically diverted from this "American Idol" fantasy into captivity as a sex-film starlet; he, striving to avenge her subjugation by getting time on the show and speaking truth to power, is likewise led to commercialize his outrage, as if Howard Beale in "Network" signed a long-term contract hosting kitchen-gizmo infomercials. Elsewhere, in a second-season episode titled "White Bear," the narrative line emerges from a blur of cleverly withheld context, and we see that we have watched the torture of a woman who, convicted as an accomplice to a gruesome murder, spends her days in a state of forced amnesia, running for her life from armed assailants while unaware that the hunt is a popular spectator sport.

Throughout, "Black Mirror" sizzles with skillful unpleasantness, conveying its dim view of human nature in a way that implicates the viewer. On the one hand, the show indicts the daily dissipation of our real world. On the other, it is not above catering to our dissipated tastes by administering bumps of the old ultraviolence. With the new season, the spectacle of sadism has seeped into the background, where it emits noxious compounds essential to the atmosphere. Witness, if you will, the season-opening episode titled "U.S.S. Callister." Here, an affluent tech schlub scavenges the DNA of his co-founder and their employees to create digital clones who exist in a personalized private-server edition of the company's successful online game. The spaceship of the episode's title is an alternative-universe model of "Star Trek" 's Enterprise. The antihero at his helm behaves like a Captain Kirk who has degenerated into Colonel Kurtz: playing a boy's game of beaming down to distant planets to defeat pulp villains, he behaves with the cruelty of a slave master, inherently, as each clone possesses a self-awareness tantamount to having a soul. The power trip is intrinsic to his pleasure; the episode suggests the universal show-biz complicity in romancing myths of domination, galactic and otherwise.

The series, with its insistent eye for sinister impulses, can be too much to take. This is partly a credit to its psychological acuity, partly a consequence of its tonal intensity when unspooling morality plays. Though "Black Mirror" covers all the capital vices, there is no God in its moral universe, just human souls with their bare hands tapping at smooth machines and hearts lusting for the blood of seeming justice. Its strongest ideas and images are so on the nose that they might as well be your glasses. When a storyteller imagines, as series creator Charlie Brooker did in 2013, an insolent computer-animated bear from a TV show running for Parliament and ultimately emerging as the face of an authoritarian state, he is not so much spinning a yarn as spreading the news.

Dozens of times, when watching a violent film, I have covered my eyes with my hands. However, I had never physically turned my back on a television set until I withdrew from the sixth episode of the new season, titled "Black Museum." The episode presents, among its cabinet of curiosities, a sci-fi fable about an E.R. doctor. A Cronenbergian implant-a sort of empathetic mind-meld gizmo-enables the doctor to feel his patients' pain in his own nervous system. Experiencing death, he returns to the mortal plane addicted to agony. It was not the gore of the story-of the doctor, cut off from his supply of other people's suffering, entering a self-mutilation phase-that revolted me, though there was that. What made the scene unwatchable is the same element that inspires me to recommend it: the way the gore laced with the nausea (inspired by the fiendishness of the dramatic device of the implant) probed pain and destruction so exactly as to feel invasive. My turn away from the show maybe shares its posture with an unease some viewers feel for the new season. When the moral arguments of "Black Mirror" grow strident, and overbearing klaxons ring about corporate surveillance states, an episode can weigh like a ponderous cyberpunk parable, and the effect is off-putting. Still, the series's lively futurist premises and tight production design combine to supply shocks of recognition. Suspense stories about violated memories and surveilled minds transmit the queasiness of everyday alienations.

We live in the best of all possible worlds for dystopian fantasies to flourish. "Radical pessimism is a dismal trend," Jill Lepore wrote in this magazine last June while surveying the golden age of dystopian fiction. Adaptations of novels by Philip K. Dick and Margaret Atwood will continue to flow on small screens. Ads touting new paranoid thrillers will continue to aim at consumers across all their media devices, according to algorithmic decree. And, because this virtual weather won't let up anytime soon, I'd like to propose classing the precise dystopia of "Black Mirror" as a cacotopia, by way of putting a name to the sensation it delivers.

Cacotopia is a synonym for dystopia coined, in the eighteenth century, from the Greek kakós, meaning "bad." It shares that root with kakistocracy, a word that denotes government by the worst persons, and which therefore has gained unprecedented prominence in the past year. Anthony Burgess, discussing "Nineteen Eighty-Four," favored the term on account of its gagging acrid sound: "I prefer to call Orwell's imaginary society a cacotopia-on the lines of cacophony or cacodemon. It sounds worse." Some academics differentiate between dystopian fictions as those that primarily contend with political oppression and cacotopian ones as those that foreground moral decline, and the distinction has its uses.

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With "Black Mirror," Our Dystopia Gets the Television Show It Deserves

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Throughout, the series sizzles with skillful unpleasantness, conveying its dim view of human nature in a way that implicates the viewer.

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Overprotective Technology of a Nearby Future

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Jodie Foster & Rosemarie DeWitt On BLACK MIRROR "Arkangel"