The Culture of Living on Screen and the Audience-Human as Screenshot

Abstract

This paper asserts the idea that everyday life is screened while screens are humanised. As a matter of fact, the screens, which once consisted of detached mechanisms limited to certain places and positioned "in front" of the audience, at this point, "surround" the spaces and people. Televisions, mobile phones, tablets, laptops, desktop computers, automobile screens, smart technologies, and flashing billboards are reshaping the connections of modern individuals with the space they live in, the time they feel, the relationships they develop, and their own beings. So much so that the screens that are connected to almost all devices and organize daily life entirely cease to be a platform for viewing images and turn into a kind of spectator's eye. In this regulation, the modern human performs many vital acts from working to having fun, from learning to experiencing, from adapting to resisting not "through the screen" as it once was, but now "as the screen". This "screen culture", which basically imitates and perhaps targets the eye, has become one of the norms of digital life. The theoretical framework of this research, which tries to see both the premises of the rapid transformation in question and to trace the ambiguous course, consists of the works of pioneering thinkers such as Gunther Anders, Jean Baudrillard and Byung-Chul Han. For this purpose, in this qualitative study, sociological film analysis is carried out through the episode of Fifteen Million Merits (2011) of the series Black Mirror, one of the Sci-Fi examples that have become very popular in recent years. This episode is notable in terms both of embodying and of nurturing discussions about the screen society.