Web series as an heterotopic space. An analysis about Black Mirror and the Italian web series Lost in Google

This paper is meant to analyze some web series as Black Mirror, by Charlie Broker (2011/2013) and the italian Lost in Google, by The Jackal (2013), through a re-reading of the concepts of utopia and heterotopia by Foucault (1984). Is it possible to define web as an heterotopic space (horizon)? If web series are products of an heterotopic space, which narrative relationship is built between reality and imagination? Black Mirror is based on the idea of “screen” as “window” (Sobchack 1992): window through which it’s possible to explore a reality empowered by the media stationing capability. In fact Black Mirror suggests that all technological means, from mobile phones to tablets, are “black mirrors” in which every aspects of the human nature realizes to the paradox. Black Mirror also suggests an horizon where distance between ego and the world outside does not exist anymore just because all filters (media, windows, etc.) become media-worlds. The narrative structure of the serial product is set on a plane where symbolic “pours” in imaginary and reality becomes an “effect” given by this pouring. Web series would be a product of the negotiation process between medium, identity and identification. A process that, on a hand, is based on the nature itself of “capitalism”, empowering, trough the web, the industrial nature of the “series product”. On the other hand, web series, exactly because they are built for the web, sacrifice their seriality character to a shared writing where imaginaries are floating and continuously rewritten, as in Lost in Google.