In this public lecture and discussion Professor Greg Singh will present from his forthcoming book ‘Black Mirror: Allegories for the Atomised’ (Routledge, 2025). The presentation will be followed by a Q&A session.

This event is hybrid and you can attend in-person or online. Further details to follow. Location to be confirmed.

Black Mirror: Allegories for the Atomised (Routledge, 2025) addresses the ways that media and communications technologies shape our relationships with society, with others, and ultimately, with ourselves.

The main themes and discussions of this book are inspired by the imaginative storytelling and self-reflecting, wry, textual strategies and representations found in the Channel 4/Netflix global hit, Black Mirror – a key touchstone in popular culture. Indeed, Black Mirror is so prevalent in mainstream culture, that the series title itself has more-or-less become synonymous with technologically-driven dread, with a loss of control over knowledge and certainty, and with the existential anxieties that people experience on an everyday level; anxieties that have emerged through the development of relationship-altering communications technologies and practices existing in the contemporary media landscape. In short, our world has come to feel “a bit like an episode of Black Mirror.”

Moving beyond the conventional parameters of Television Studies scholarship, Black Mirror: Allegories for the Atomised takes an interdisciplinary approach informed through depth- and Self-psychology, Science Fiction Studies, Science and Technology Studies, communitarian ethics, and the Philosophy of Technology to conduct a critical inquiry into those aspects of memory, identity, surveillance, simulation and gamification prevalent in the series, that shape our reality and call into question our assumed notions of personhood.

This presentation, in line with the themes and concerns of the 1984 Exhibition, takes as its focal point, the book’s Chapter 2 themes of surveillance, control and punishment.

The theme of surveillance is a common theme in discussions of media technology and its representation. This presentation discusses how the related notions of panoptics (in effect, the “many-watched-by-one”) and synoptics (the “one-watched-by-many”) are put into practice through techno-social innovation, and how these practices of surveillance impact upon people’s lives, relationships and interactions. Forces at play (behaviour modification, paranoia, the act of voyeurism, the limiting of privacy rights and so on), are amplified through the interplay of social institutions and technological intervention, where the focus is firmly upon the shifting power dynamics of interpersonal trust and personal credibility. These reputation systems are familiar to us: built into everyday social technologies. A longstanding concern for communication studies and social psychology, the role of surveillance technologies in relieving uncertainty in mediated communications, relieving anxieties around public safety, and mitigating risk in social interactions has become part of everyday life. Risk, and its reduction, is enfolded in the fabric of social relations, and we find its presence in engaging with others in public spaces (physical and virtual), and in private communications and shared intimacy.

In this presentation I discuss the ways Black Mirror represents semi-permanent connectivity, as both accelerating spectacular (and surreptitious) ways of looking, but also disrupting appeals to privacy.

Key words:

Black Mirror; Charlie Brooker; Science Fiction Television; Science and Technology Studies; memory; personhood; surveillance; simulation; labour; alienation.

Biography

Greg Singh is Professor in Media and Society at the University of Stirling, UK. He has published on an extensive range of topics, including YouTube and lifestyle television, cinephilia, CGI, videogames, and open data. Books include Film After Jung (2009); Feeling Film (2013); and The Death of Web 2.0 (2019) (all Routledge).