With the continuous advancements of technology, the online world now offers us a never-ending list of possibilities – but how is this presented in television?
Thanks to that, the internet has become a common theme in various television shows, which often focus on the negative side of the web and how it can be used for bad.
We’ve picked out five times that our favourite television shows made us want to avoid going online. At least for a while.
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Black Mirror – Shut up and Dance
Ok – so to be fair to the people behind the screens in this episode, they do target people who have done genuinely bad stuff.
Despite that, the idea of someone being able to keep their eye on you by hacking into your laptop is a fear that resonates with a lot of people. There’s definitely been an increase in the number of people sticking tape over their laptop’s webcams since Black Mirror came into existence, anyway.
You
Netflix’s recent hit-series You quickly became one of the platform’s most-watched shows and conversation surrounding it dominated social media for weeks following its release.
Obviously it was a little farfetched in places, though the underlying story of a weird obsessive guy being able to keep tabs on his new love interest through her social media felt uncomfortably possible.
Catfish
This is a weird one – the way the show is created, it puts the scenarios forward to viewers in a much more comedic light than it would be for the people involved.
It offers a stark reminder that this kind of thing does actually happen online and people can be genuinely crushed by this false persona they think they’re falling in love with.
13 Reasons Why
This show was ground-breaking for a number of reasons: it featured some amazing acting performances and tackled a lot of issues in a way that no series had really done before.
Cyberbullying plays a sizeable part in the tragic storyline that sees 17-year-old Hannah Baker take her own life. The grisly nature of the show means the impact of online abuse is highlighted more in this than any other fictional series.
Black Mirror – Nosedive
Ok, so this whole list could have been Black Mirror episodes in all honesty, few shows do ‘scary futuristic online things’ better.
Nosedive sees everyone scoring each other in day-to-day life on this freaky little app. The idea is simple, a person does a good deed and someone who witnesses it scores them up, the higher their score the better the perks they can access. Alternatively if a person pulls a social faux pas they’re scored down, resulting in them generally being looked down upon by the rest of society.
What other television series make you sceptical of the internet? Let us know across our social channels.
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Featured Image Credit: Channel 4/Netflix