“The Social Dilemma”: Why You Should Review Your Opinion About Social Media

Feeling of anxiety, restless legs and the fear of missing out: all of this are direct effects that social media has on our body and mind. And that’s not unpurposed. The Social Dilemma, the new documentary from Netflix directed by Jeff Orlowski reveals the threats of the giants of technology on humanity and the cutting edge strategies that algorithms used to know pretty much everything about us – and how they use that data to keep us online as much as they can.

Much of the information the program provides is already of our knowledge, but the situation gets scarier as we hear from the former social media creators and workers about what is behind the scenes. The whole narrative rounds around one of the main testimonies and the speech of Tristan Harris, Google’s design ethics ex-specialis and Center for Humane Technology founder, who tells his trajectory within the Gmail creation team and his perception about the development of the tool in an excessive way, without thinking about the effects of technology on users. In addition, there are interspersed interviews with other social media experts from companies such as Facebook, Pinterest and Instagram as well. I felt I was having a deep intimate conversation about my own experience with my dangerous smartphone. All of them have a deep knowledge about the internal operation of the complex machine that we call social networking.

An interesting parallel quoted in Orlowski’s documentary is that the only businesses that refer to its clients as “users” are the drug and technology ones. That’s funny, isn’t it? From that simple statement is easy to understand how it all works. Everything’s about making the users addicted and engaged to the content in their feeds, scrolling the screen until they are turned into real byers. The social networks are constantly leading us to the propaganda and advertisement path, and the companies know exactly what we need – or what we think we need.

If you’re wondering if it is another boring documentary with a non-stop talking of professionals, you’re completely wrong. The interviews are mixed with a fictional representation of a family that suffers the effects of social networks. From a teenager who has her self-esteem directly impacted by the like industry to a young man dominated by the viral ideas that threaten the democracy of the State, we can see a clear example of the day by day life of a society that’s immersed into a world of algorithms that are millimetric personalized to make us a hostage of the capitalist strategies and the market interests.

Watching it is like waking up to many issues we are facing in 2020. With a pandemic hitting us hard, the fake news industry feeds social networking creating tons of uninformed people by the false feeling of the truth. Not only was the society blinded by a parallel reality totally unrelated to real life, but it is also bringing off the screen the pretexts that social networks provide us. The Social Dilemma is a real warning to show that we have to live life out here, or we will continue to sink into a vicious cycle that only serves the interests of an industry much bigger than us.

Below, see the official trailer:

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The article above was edited by Laura Ferrazzano. 

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• Netflix
• social media
• the social dilemma