I watched the first 3 episodes of S3 last night, and as soon as I saw the headline for this story, I thought of Nosedive. Watching Nosedive, I thought how clos

I watched the first 3 episodes of S3 last night, and as soon as I saw the headline for this story, I thought of Nosedive. Watching Nosedive, I thought how close to it we were already, it's just that we're measuring people in terms of Followers or Likes. This path started I think when we prioritised Google Analytics numbers over the positive effects you create within your audience: clicks, traffic, unique visitors all seem to count more in 2016 than loyalty and shared values that dominated publishing for the prior 100 years or more. In the age of "personal brand" it makes sense to me that we're going to end up with "personal metrics" and we're just seeing the tip of the iceberg. At the end of Nosedive I decided if that was the future of my society, I'd stay being me and suffer the consequences. I'd rather be happy in my own skin that be popular, and if I lived in a society that turned popularity into a measure of personal worth, I'd quite happy to be a dissident within it.