| Summary: | The idea I will try to argue in this article is that a supposed “embodied media phobia” can more rightly be conceived of as an ideological catalyst of dysphoric beliefs about contemporary computational media rather than as entailing a factual risk for the future to be brought about by virtual and augmented reality. In this regard, the proliferation of sci-fi and of dystopian narratives within the contemporary film scene – prototypically represented by the TV series Black Mirror – conditions and even promotes the development of self-reflective thinking regarding the “dystopia in our daily lives” (Attimonelli and Susca 2020). Such ideology will be demystified in a further way too, by proposing a reflection around the concept of meta-operativity: according to the aesthetic theory advanced by Emilio Garroni (1977) and Pietro Montani (2014, 2018), if the interaction with embodied media can be conceived of as a process able to drive the development of meta-operative competence, then the symbolic value of dystopian stories can be understood as a strategy to foster meta-textual reading and a self-reflective interpretation of one’s own experience.
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