Guy McHendry, PhD, associate professor in the Department of Communication Studies, published the chapter “Arkangel: Postscript on Families of Control” in T. Sweeney & S. Joy (Eds.), Through the Black Mirror: Deconstructing the Side Effects of the Digital Age (2019, Palgrave-Macmillian).
In the chapter, McHendry explores how the television show, Black Mirror works rhetorically to encourage some degree of self-reflection around our emerging dependence on social-surveillance technology. The chapter takes up that task by unpacking critical theories of surveillance in concert with the episode “Arkangel” to explore the emergence of Surveiller-Parenting—a network of surveillance norms, practices, and technologies which encourages parents to place their children under intense surveillance. McHendry argues “Arkangel” expresses contemporary anxieties about fragmentary and disparate techniques of surveillance by constructing a future of intensified networks of control which link the families, schools, and corporations under die logic of late capitalism.
