“The National Anthem”, Terrorism and Digital Media

Abstract

“The National Anthem”, the first episode of Charlie Brooker’s television anthology series, Black Mirror (2011–), deals with a number of contemporary issues, namely, public reactions to, and fear of, terrorism, and the democratising power of social media. This chapter makes an original intervention in analyses of the series by focusing on surveillance in relation to cultural humiliation and terrorism. It engages theoretically with the work of Thomas Mathiesen (1997) on synoptic spectatorship as well as that of Brigitte Nacos (2016) in relation to mass-mediated terrorism to argue that there are several repercussions of new media not yet explored in works about this episode. These include an apparent democratisation of power, via what is termed here as “synaptic surveillance”, that exists in tension with accepted models of surveillance described by Michel Foucault (1991) and Mathiesen (1997), an accelerated pace of events, the propagandist potential and capacity of digital media for “fake news”, and the ready malleability of public opinion and resultant collective agency via emotional response rather than rational process. Effectively, the episode, while fictionalised, illustrates the real-world complexity of multiplatform media, with one individual controlling the consciousness of the many and these, in forming synaptic connections with others, ultimately mandating the actions of another character.