Memory restlessness. Technology and amplified memories in Black Mirror series

One of the recurring themes in contemporary audiovisual science fiction has revolved around the relationship between memory and technology. In these types of stories, the social and individual implications of a transhuman memory, that is, technologically improved or augmented, have been approached with relative frequency. In this paper, I intend to analyze how the relationship between memory and technology has been represented in the successful television fiction series Black Mirror. From an approach based on studies on cultural memory and television fiction, and from the analysis of qualitative content, I specifically examine two chapters that explicitly thematize the relationships between memory and technology: The Entire History of You (2011) and Crocodile (2017). The results of the analysis show how, in these episodes, the irruption of mnemotechnological innovations leads to a decentering around the very concepts of remembering and forgetting, upsetting the limits between registration and recall, between the archive and memory, between personal and public and even between past and present. In these chapters, the social and human reaches of the amplification by technological prostheses of the biological capacities of registration, storage and recovery of memory are delineated critically from two fundamental axes: on the one hand, memory as an object of compulsive consumption, and on the other, memory as an object of social control.