Black Mirrors: The entire history

In the third episode of the British TV show Black Mirrors, the director brings us to an early future scenario. In this environment technology has a really important role in people's life. A chip called "grain" is installed in their skin and allows them to reproduce past memories at any desired time with the simple click of a button. In this episode, the main character, Liam, leaves a interview from a possible future job and he is not happy about how it went. During the ride back, he decides to go over his interview and analyze every single aspect of it. Once he arrives to his destination, he joins dinner with his wife and a couple of friends at a friend's house.In order to remember some of the names of the people at the house, he decides to go over his memories with them to learn their names. Once he arrives he tells his wife and the people at dinner that his meeting didn't go as well as he though. People ask him to reproduce his memory on the big screen so they can talk about it and exchange perspectives, he refuses to do it because he doesn't want them to see it. During dinner, a discussion about the chip is brought up. Everyone around the table has one except a girl who decided to take it off her skin. Most people agreed that the "grain" is a great advantage and it is really helpful; but, this one girl argues that she would rather have her own memories in her head, than rely in that chip to reproduce them. During the rest of the TV show, Liam uses the chip to try to learn more about his wife's relationship with one of the people that were at the house. After going thru memories and memories of him, his wife, and the other guy ( by forcing them to show him the memories), he finds out that his wife has been cheating on him during their marriage, and that the kid they had together wasn't actually his. The episode ends with Liam deciding to eliminate the chip out of his body forever.

This episode brought us to a fiction world not too far away from the reality that we live nowadays. Technology has become such an important part of our lives that, to a certain point, it is taking full control over us.

As Liam and the rest of the characters experienced during the episode, their lives were exposed to the rest of the world taking away from them any type of privacy or intimacy desired. Because the "grain" was attached to their lives, they were fully dependent on it for whatever they wanted to do. Memory wasn't an important skill anymore. Cheating or lying wasn't an option because everyone would be able to find out the truth at some point. Memories would be recorded forever and it was up to the character to reproduce them or not. This situations are still far from what we see in our day a day lives; but, there are also a lot of common points and similarities between both situations. Nowadays technologies and apps like text messages or Facebook bring us to the same spectrum as the chip does with the characters of the episode. Text messages controls our communication in so many different levels, giving us the option to save and replicate messages for as much time as we want. They also make our memory useless in some case because with text messages you have now the capacity to retain information that doesn't need to be in your head anymore. Finally, apps like Facebook have the same impact in our lives. A timeline of pictures, posts, and events is saved there for the rest of our lives. Privacy and intimacy become useless because of the social and cultural impact of Facebook, people can know what we are doing or what are we up to at any given time. In other words, technology has always been an important part of our lives; but, in the past years, the situation has become extreme. We are at a point in our lives that technology has taken power over us and over some of our skills that distinguish us as humans, skills like memory or privacy. If this situation keeps getting worse and worse, in a couple of years we also will be talking about "grains" and repruction of our memories.