The Influence Of Ideology

All these aesthetic properties, such as sound, colors, lighting, editing and so on, are meticulously chosen and combined with the elements of the story in order to generate sensual experiences and evoke particular affective responses in the viewer.

III. CULTURAL ANALYSIS

As Barthes (1971) explained, meaning is always cultural and can never be final or closed (as cited in Ott and Mack, 2014, p. 115). Therefore, it is not strange that our decoding of this episode was in a sense ’wrong’ until the very end because we were relying on the wrong myths and ideologies – someone who seems so innocent is not capable of committing despicable crimes.

Ideology assigns roles to people that we perceived as natural and that is exactly why the viewer is misled.

Most of us see pedophilia as a disgusting crime beyond any available punishment. We see it as such because we are taught to see it as such – our perception of it is normalized through ideology but not necessarily natural. This is why the twist at the end is so impactful – it makes us no longer think of Kenny as a victim, but as a criminal. Suddenly he becomes less than human, in fact less than any other character in the episode, someone who deserved everything he was put through. In contrast, if humanity was taught to see pedophilia as a mental disorder and not necessarily a crime, especially if the person hasn’t actually done anything besides looking at pornography, that feeling we got at the end of the episode could have been much

It takes our worst instincts as people, as societies, and magnifies them.” (2016). This episode is no different. Technology is what gets Kenny into trouble and what enables the anonymous tormentors to play god. What makes this episode particularly scary is the fact that all the gadgets and programs already exist and that what happened to the characters can happen to anyone. As Charlie Brooker said in an interview for Entertainment Weekly when asked about this episode, doing one without a sci-fi element was a conscious choice; they wanted to “do [an episode] that absolutely could happen” (2016). After all, Mark Zuckerberg covers his laptop camera, as will many people after watching this episode. “Shut Up and Dance” tackles one of our worst fears – the idea that our darkest and most private secrets will be revealed, and this basically shows that regardless of what gadgets we may possess, our problems remain essentially human. And technology, as already mentioned, is not a bad thing in itself. However, this episode may be seen as a warning that technology can change us so quickly that we may not even have time to realize it by “increasing the distance between us and our actions under the guise of convenience.“ (Handlen,