Must watch
for everyone. Released on Netflix in September.
A short and
comprehensive docu-drama which will open our eyes (if not already) to the ill-effects of social
media.
My quick
takeaways.
/the social dilemma
The “devil” is in details (notice the forward slash in the docu-drama name)
- From
being a force for good, social media has veered towards becoming a poster boy
of addiction
- From
tools-based technology environment (an earnest tool for finding our long-lost
family members and friends, blood donors, etc.), it has now moved into a manipulation-based
technology environment (creating addiction and manipulating our behavior)
- From
Information Age to Dis-information Age (According to research, fake news
travels 6 times faster than facts on Twitter)
- The pre-teens and teens (especially girls) highly susceptible to the dark side of social media (depression and mental health issues). There is also a new phenomenon emerging called Selfie perfection or Snapchat Dysmorphia. It means that the stress of Social Media is driving teens to plastic surgery
- Most
ex-employees of organizations like Google, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram,
Pinterest (all at senior levels) who featured in the docu-drama admitted that
they do not allow their own kids to use social media
- Most
of us are leading a life of Truman Burbank (from The Truman Show, 1998 movie)
without our knowledge.
- And some of us who are aware (yours truly included) think that it is limited to data mining, which means advertisers are serving us advertisements based on our profile, interests, location, and information that we are sharing through the apps. Guess what, it is much more vicious than that.
I may have removed all personal information from Facebook, removed all apps from my profile, and may not be as useful to the advertisers but is that enough to feel safe!
The dilemma persists. Should I stay or should I go!
And finally, the most interesting and impactful quote in the docu-drama that I would like to share here
"We live in a world in which a tree is worth more, financially, dead than alive, in a world in which a whale is worth more dead than alive. For so long as our economy works in that way and corporations go unregulated, they're going to continue to destroy trees, to kill whales, to mine the earth, and to continue to pull oil out of the ground, even though we know it is destroying the planet and we know that it's going to leave a worse world for future generations. This is short-term thinking based on this religion of profit at all costs, as if somehow, magically, each corporation acting in its selfish interest is going to produce the best result. This has been affecting the environment for a long time. What's frightening, and what hopefully is the last straw that will make us wake up as a civilization to how flawed this theory has been in the first place, is to see that now we're the tree, we're the whale. Our attention can be mined. We are more profitable to a corporation if we're spending time staring at a screen, staring at an ad, than if we're spending that time living our life in a rich way."
( (Source: IMDB)
