Convergence in Black Mirror's "Hated in the Nation"

As our world continues to transition from analogue to digital mediums, digital technology increasingly becomes an essential component in the development of society. And it is through convergence that collaborative spaces to share and communicate are created across platforms and nations.

Convergence, as Vincent Miller (2011) defines in Understanding Digital Culture, can be broken up and applied to several different mediums, each with a specific definition on how convergence operates in that world. The two most important types of convergence in digitization are “Technological Convergence” and “Convergence Culture and the New Media Experience.”

In order to better understand these two types of convergence I will be using an episode of Black Mirror titled “Hated in the Nation” to provide explicit examples of how convergence negatively affects society. Black Mirror is a satirical suspense series exploring the negative impacts of technological advancement.

Technological convergence is “the digitization of all media, communications, text, sound, images, and even currency into a common digital format or language” (Miller, 2011, 73).

Technological convergence manifests in this episode through three different technologies:

1. Phones. The phones represent the digitization of communication allowing for voice and text messages to be sent. They are able to use phones to share information quickly from different places. By tapping their phones together, they are able to share their contact information instantly.

2. Car. There is a new model of car that the lead detective uses. It has a complex computer system and is self driving. It is able to connect to and manipulate the street lights. It also allows them to work while traveling. This car is a convergence of several different technologies.

3. ADI Bees. These bees are probably the most important technological convergence in the episode. They replicate a living organism and are a self-efficient technology that is still tracked and managed by a large company. Most important however is that they are able to be mass controlled by one individual.

Convergence culture is especially apparent in the second type of convergence involving convergence culture and the new media experience.

Convergence culture + new media experience = participatory culture.

The threat posed in the episode stems from participatory culture and the users ability to use and manipulate technology, particularly with social media. This episode follows a social media game on Twitter. Users are guided by a video to use the hashtag #deathto and tag the user they want to die.

Everyday the most tagged user will die and the game resets for the next day. The possibility of killing the person you hate the most gives users the incentive to keep participating in the game. They buy into the media and its advantages that convergence culture provides. One person controlled the game, but hundreds of thousands of people participated.

If convergence culture didn’t exist, the threat posed in this episode would not exist. “Hated in the Nation” is supplied by convergence and its effects on society.