Speaker: Jeff Jarvis
In an episode of the popular Netflix Sci-fi show, Black Mirror, we are introduced to a world where everyone is given a rating (a hologram number that floats above people’s head). Throughout the day your personal number would fluctuate as others rated your social media posts and real-life interactions. The maximum you can get is a five – but the aim for someone who wants to excel in business and live in a nice apartment is to get a rating of 4.5. This unending fluctuation and pursuit of a higher number, you can imagine, leads people to being neurotic about posting online, making sure they maintain friendships with people who have high ratings and never embarrassing themselves in public.
What makes this terrifying is that it’s probably closer to reality than we might acknowledge. In a world of ratings and likes and shares, how easy is it to lose a sense of who we really are? Let’s talk about it at the gym this Sunday.