In-Class Bluebook Exam:
In a 500-word essay, show how a character from one of the stories suffers a moral failing in the context of Arthur C. Brooks' essay "Love People, Not Pleasure." You can modify your blue book exam into a fully realized typed Essay #4.
Option Three Modified for Essay #4
In a 1,400-word essay, analyze two stories, which can include the TV drama "Nosedive," in terms of the Faustian Bargain described in the essay "Love People, Not Pleasure," by Arthur C. Brooks. Be sure your essay at least 3 sources.
One of your sources can be Black Mirror Season 3, Episode 1: "Nosedive."
Suggested Outline:
Paragraph One: Summarize the essay "Love People, Not Pleasure."
Paragraph Two. Develop a thesis that applies the principles of "Love People, Not Pleasure," to the stories you've chosen.
Paragraph Three. Write a thesis that shows how "Love People, Not Pleasure" explains the Faustian Bargain (deal with the devil) that characters make. For example,
The characters' self-destruction is the result of a Faustian Bargain as described in "Love People, Not Pleasure," as evidenced by ______________, _______________, ____________________, _____________________, and _______________________.
Paragraphs 4-8 are your supporting paragraphs.
Paragraph 9, your conclusion, is a dramatic restatement of your thesis.
Developing a Newer, Perhaps More Relevant Angle for Your Assignment: Finding the Relationship Between Consumerism and Social Media
In the Black Mirror episode "Nosedive" from Season 3, we see a dehumanizing relationship between consumerism and social media:
One. Consumers are vulnerable to a bombardment of social media ratings. Ratings determine our behavior and privilege. We become imprisoned by ratings.
Notice everything today is a rating or a survey. Rate My Professor. Rate My Student. Rate My Doctor. You can rate everything on Yelp. These ratings affect our perceptions of businesses and individuals. Our credibility is on the line.
We engage in mutual sycophantism and become fawning parasites so everyone "likes" us and we "like" them.
We're lazy. We adapt to path of least resistance. If technology gives us an easy way to rank someone, we will eventually accept that ranking as the common currency. We become therefore a slave to the ranking system.
Two. Consumers live in a hierarchy where desirability, social ranking, and class privileges are all determined by social media metrics. It doesn't matter if the metrics are accurate or not. What matters is that the metrics are there and being used. They are the currency. We have no choice. If we shun the ranking system, we become pariahs.
Three. Consumers find a sort of Faustian Bargain or deal with the devil in that they more they ascend social media rankings the more they become vulnerable, helpless, miserable children dependent on social ranking as a compensation that they have never truly developed as human beings. As Sherry Turkle says, we try to "fill the holes in out tattered selves" with "likes."
Part of the Faustian Bargain is we trade real assessments of people for the instant gratification of a ranking. And we rely on our own rankings for the dopamine rush of being "liked" or getting stars. This reliance on such stimulation infantilizes us.
Notice the show's disparity between the sugary infantilized chirpy talk with the underlying rage and the need to vent real emotion.
Four. Related to the above, consumers find that maintaining a chipper, perky facade or facsimile of happiness eventually makes them crack.
Five. We find that the exaggerated condition in "Nosedive" is analogous to what is going on today with Yelp, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. For example, people present a fabricated happiness on Facebook and other social media sites. Worse, people become dependent, on an addictive level, to the social approval received.
Six. We find that "Nosedive" already mirrors social credit rating system in China.
Sample Thesis
Joseph Nagel from "The Anxious Man," Richard from "The Incalculable Life Gesture," and Lacie Pound from "Nosedive" are three lost souls teetering on the abyss, their misery the result of making the kind of Faustian Bargains explained in Arthur C. Brooks' "Love People, Not Pleasure."
Slightly Better Thesis
As the stories in It's Beginning to Hurt and Black Mirror's "Nosedive" show, developing a dependence on lust, greed, power, social approval, and privilege are all misguided attempts at finding happiness that result in addiction and despair as evident in the masterful essay "Love People, Not Pleasure," by Arthur C. Brooks.
Sources for Your Essay:
Initial Impressions Upon Watching "Nosedive"
One. Technology has created the fear of being a pariah on one hand and the chimerical quest to be a "5.0" on the other.
Two. This desperation to avoid pariah status and to enjoy 5.0 status helps manipulate people in the marketplace and keeps them at the childish stage of development.
Three. Social media ranking systems create social stratification, the Us Vs. Them mentality that exists in many societies including Ursula Le Guin's "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" and H.G. Wells' "The Country of the Blind."
Four. As we conform to the insipid images adorned in social media, imitating celebrated "lifestyles," such as making olive tapenade, we become more like technology and less like ourselves to the point that we lose ourselves.
Five. People are so addicted to ranking and sycophantic flattery they can no longer sustain adult, honest conversation.
Six. As a result of holding back their real emotions in favor of the sycophantic veneer, they build up rage that slowly turns inward and poisons their very being.
Seven. Becoming a 5.0 is the equivalent of becoming the Elect in Christianity while the rest of humanity is damned. Even a techno-secular system such as the one depicted in "Nosedive" has a quasi-religious element.
Eight. Getting high ranking, stars, and "likes" becomes a dopamine rush, which in turn becomes an addiction as an entire society is dependent on the instant gratification of social media feedback.
Nine. The more we become addicted to social media feedback the more we perform our sycophantic acrobatics for our cloying audience and the more we placate our cloying audience the more we become an infantilized culture.
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