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Reflections From a Black Mirror: S1 E3 “The Entire History of You” (Netflix)
Generally, I think Black Mirror uses technology as a screen used to create enough distance between ourselves and our behaviors to allow us the ability to be objective. Unfortunately, too many people miss the point that what is reflected in the “Black Mirrors” of our smartphone screens is not some other technologies, it is our own faces.
In this instance, S1 E3, “The Entire History of You (TEHOY)” is a cautionary tale about our apparent desire to use technology to access total and immediate recall of every event that we experienced throughout the course our entire lives.
I suspect that part of our desire for this perfect recall is because, deep down, we all see ourselves as the heroes of our own stories or as incapable of being in error. Almost as if because we trust in our own version of our lives story so much we want to be able to use it to use the visual proof as a backup to settle mundane daily disputes.
In other words, upon shallow reflection, we believe that having the ability to go back immediately and “check the record” will always prove that we were right and that whoever we were interacting with was, as usual, wrong about the events we both participate in.
