Greetings Steemians!

Today, I'd like to introduce a TV show which I'm sure many of you have heard of or even watched already - called Black Mirror. The episodes in this TV Show are totally independent of each other and can be viewed as independent short films. Each of the short films draw on some aspect of society and explores how it could lead to a dysfunctional society with undesired consequences.

Since each of the episodes are written and directed by different people, the series as a whole explores quite a different number of themes and each from the angle of their respective creators.

Name: Nosedive (Black Mirror S03E01)
Director: Joe wright
Writers: Charlie Brooker (created by), Charlie Brooker (story by)
Type: Drama, Sci-Fi, Thriller.
Rate on IMDb: 8.8
Release Date: 21 October 2016 (USA)

Cast	Character
Bryce Dallas Howard	Lacie
Alice Eve	Naomie
James Norton	Ryan
Alan Ritchson	Paul
Daisy Haggard	Bets
Michaela Coel	Airport Stewardess
Demetri Goritsas	Hansen
Kadiff Kirwan	Chester
Sope Dirisu	Man in Jail

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Episode Summary

On the 21st of October, Season 3 was released onto Netflix. The first episode - Nosedive, was in my eyes particularly interesting because it presented a society not too different from ours. In this society, a social network has taken over almost every aspect of everyone's lives and most importantly, a rating out of 5 is attached to each individual which is calculated by the rating's given to you by each person you interact with.

A simple conversation will end with a mutual rating ritual where each person would rate the other and the overall rating would adjust.

Your rating could be seen as a recognition system, and in this world, everybody can see each other's rating above their heads. It follows that everybody seeks to improve their rating because the whole of society deems this number as some sort of representation of the individuals personal quality.

Seems reasonable at first, but it extends to all facets of life and can determine whether you can get cancer treatment, buy the house you want, get a loan, be accepted into certain social circles.. the list goes on. In-fact, every aspect of society requires the individual to have a reasonable rating, the higher it is, the better life you could afford.

The series centre's around a girl named Lacie who much like everyone else is trapped in this pseudo reputation arms race. Although she began with a respectable 4.2 score, she found that certain aspects of life eluded her unless her score reached a higher level. For example, the house she wanted to buy required her score to be above 4.5.

As she struggled to break into higher echelons of her score rating, she frequently saw the affluent people with near 5 ratings obtain the best jobs, live at the best neighbourhoods and live a life that she herself could only dream of. It was clear that she was not content with her life at 4.2 and sought to increase her score in an effort to improve her life.

What's more, Lacie's daily grind that afforded her the 4.2 rating seemed to have reached a bottleneck. She found it difficult to increase her rating because achieving a higher rating required votes from people with higher ratings - people she had very little contact with and mostly existed in their own high rating social circles.

One day, it seemed that luck had finally sided with Lacie and one of her old school friends with a very high 4.8 rating invited her to her wedding, seemingly because of their friendship's sentimental value. Since birds of a feather flock together, Lacie knew that the attendees of this wedding would all have high ratings as they belonged in the same upper class as her friend.

If she delivers a great speech at the wedding, then she would surely get the votes from all the people with high ratings and in turn boost her own rating to a new high. Lacie revelled at this opportunity and began doing everything she could to maintain the approval of her friend such that she would get that golden opportunity to deliver the speech.

Of course, with a society so fixated on gaining popularity and more importantly a higher rating, her invitation was a calculated move that was mutually beneficial both to Lacie as well as her friend. Inviting Lacie to the wedding showed people that she had compassion for those less fortunate and that she didn't just value people because of their ratings - a move that would see her get even more votes!

Consumed by the potential boost to her social status, Lacie set on her way to the wedding only to be met with a series of unfortunate events that jeopardised her opportunity to attend. As this wedding was her gateway to a new life, she did everything she could to make it there. At first, her flight was cancelled which led to her getting into a dispute with the airport staff.

This then resulted in her receiving a temporary one day point deduction as well as accruing double negative votes. As the nightmare went on, she became more and more frustrated as her rating dropped lower and lower and her dream of having a high rating slipped further and further away. This was the nail in her coffin as her unrelenting haste resulted in her rating dropping so low that her friend no longer deemed her suitable to attend the wedding.

Lacie, with her rating now at hopeless low decided she had nothing to lose, for her spiralling decline had already damaged her reputation so much that it was pointless trying anything to remedy it. She decided to attend the wedding anyway in a last ditch effort to deliver her speech.

In the presence of so many highly rated people, she exacerbated her situation by refusing to leave the wedding, and continued to voice profanity and her new found ability of speaking freely. It was not what people wanted to hear, even if it was the truth. The harsh reality for her was that everyone else was so vested in maintaining their rating that even if they agreed or felt compassion for her, they wouldn't risk showing their support.

Lacie ended up in Prison. A prison where citizens ratings are deemed so low that they are no longer deemed fit to linger in society. Opposite her cell, there was a man in a suit who probably also experienced a nose dive in his ratings. They proceed to scream and shout profanity at each other like it was a form of relief. The irony of it all is that they had unshackled themselves from the expectations of society - and the social network which guarded it, and found themselves shackled up in prison being "free" to say anything they want.

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A simple number cannot represent every aspect of a human

In this episode, moral quality is judged by a single attribute. The rating score. This score seems to be an indicator for every aspect of that individual and yet we know that every person is unique and has strengths and weaknesses in a multitude of immeasurable personal attributes. We see the consequences of the people judging each other based on this rating and how superficial it can lead the society to become. Morality is called into question because suddenly it is deemed acceptable to use this rating negatively, to harm or segregate individuals purely because of this one dimensional metric.

Even though this episode is an exaggeration, it is something conceivable in today's society where people spend more and more time online carving out their niche and building their online reputation and persona. Social networks have allowed people to garner large followings and become popular.

More than ever, people are trying to make their life seem perfect and present a version of themselves that gathers the support of the crowd. Being superficial is now becoming the standard way to act, and it's all in effort to boost your social acceptability in a world where social media dominates the attention of everybody.

Obviously any social media rating or other metric used to measure the popularity or reputation of the individual has to be taken with a pinch of salt. After all, the real reputation of a person is a judgement made by everyone and placed in their heart. Not something that is easily quantifiable to just a one dimensional number.

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How about using a reputation score?

In China, people are already using a reputation score system. Alibaba and Tencent have spearheaded this system and it's scary to think how closely this resonates with this short film. People with high scores enjoy exclusive services from free deposits, staying in hotels and renting cars, to getting a visa without any property statements. They even enjoy increased loan limits.

Of course, these reputation scores are built from transaction histories and loan records instead of a score based on social interactions. If we followed the logic of the film, then those who built their high scores from social interactions alone would have the best credit and thus given the best loan opportunities. Is that justified? Of course not..

Reputation scores are not inherently bad, I do believe that they have a place in a social context but overly simplifying to a single number cannot fully represent anything meaningful. The scores would be better interpreted if they were tied to different aspects of the individual and used with respect to the context with which the score is calculated. This I imagine would mean that we would have many many different scores across many different attributes.

Finally, it has to be mentioned that the reputation score reminds me of Steemit and it's own reputation scoring system. We all have this number beside our name that is suppose to gauge a user's reputation through their long term contribution to the social network. It actually seems to work somewhat similar to the rating system in the film. The more votes you get from people of higher reputation, the higher yours will climb, and vice versa in the case of flagging. Whilst I don't know the maths or algorithm behind how this reputation score is calculated, it is still a number that is calculated through a mathematical algorithm.

One of the take home morals of this story is reputation is hard to quantify. A person's reputation can be numerically high, but what matters at the end of the day, is the reputation of that person in everybody else's mind. Never judge a person using just a score, it will make social networks a better place.

Source: 1.2.

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剧名：急转直下（黑镜第三季第1集） •背景:黑镜是英国电视4台于2011年12月播出的迷你电视剧。第三季转交给netflix制作。黑镜，指的就是生活中无处不在，大大小小的屏幕---在墙上的电视，桌子上的电脑，手掌间的智能手机... •剧情概述——未来科技的冰冷世界: 片中讲述了社会上每个人都可以用分数评判周围的人，一次对话，一次服务甚至偶遇路人之后，只要对方让你愉悦，就可以给对方全5颗星为对方加分，就像坐完Uber给对方打分一样。每一个人的眼睛带识别系统，一眼就能看到路遇对方的总分数。然而明显放大了阶级问题。 女孩Lacie为了增加自己的评分，不惜去讨好曾经伤害她的闺蜜，就因为闺蜜婚礼上的宾客全是4.5分以上阶层。她起床就忙着在镜子前练习取悦别人的假笑，获得4.5分以上宾客们的五星好评，自己跃进上层就不远了。事与愿违，社交网络最后把Lacie的美梦变为噩梦，一切真实的让人无法反驳。

一个简单的数字不能代表一个人的全部
这部剧里，人类进入了人品就是分数，分数就是一切的世界。展示了现代科技对人类社会的威胁，并展现了人们拥有道德审判权利之后，来互相伤害，屏蔽彼此。
我必须要说剧里的描述是夸张的，虽然每个人心里自然有对周边人印象的分数评判的表格，但是社交评分只能当作一个人发展的一部分，一个人的情商和交际能力高低，不能作为评判一个人的全部。

信誉评分
在中国，人们正在使用阿里巴巴公司推出的信用评分的体系。和剧里一样，高分者有独享的服务，例如酒店免押金入住和免押金租车，少交资产证明办签证，贷款额度提升和还款的优惠等。这个信誉制度，没有片面的建立在社交好坏评分上的，而是每一次你的网络交易记录和银行还款等各方面的信誉表现。相反，如果按照剧里的逻辑，社交能力好，得分高的人，不一定讲信用会还款给银行。所以我觉得这个信用体系是积极的，有助于社会发展的。

当然也让我想起Steemit，我们每个人在这个平台上都有自己的信誉。在别人发布文章之后，我们用自己随意支配比例的投票权来评判他人的文章，就像在剧中给别人打分。Steemit平台上的信誉，名字后面的数字，是用数学理论算出来，更重要的是你真正在别人心中的信誉分.所以，对一个人的审判，其实是包含了复杂的多方面原因的，用一个简单的数字不能够评判一个人。

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Thanks for reading this really long and seemingly never ending post, I hope this review and critique was enjoyable and I look forward to having some crunchy discussions with you about it^^

This is my another film review post: I'm a film fanatic, so is China.