Review on The Netflix show "The Social Dilemma"
This documentary features interviews of many former employees, executives, and other professionals of tech companies and social media platforms like Facebook, Google, Twitter, YouTube. They discussed their experience in these companies, their contribution and how they realized what social media is capable of. The documentary revolved around how addictive its algorithm is to keep the user engaged. It claimed that these sites have three primary goals which focuses on an individual user. The goal of engagement the goal of growth and the goal of monetization.
The social dilemma points out how social media is tricking us to think in a certain way rather than having a thought based on our own goals, values and beliefs. It forces us to judge people by their social media accounts and their activities how they behave virtually than in real life, what we see virtually might not be true.
It plays with attention, patience, judgements, decisions, anxiety. It creates an illusion that the world and others are portraying the place is much better than the place we are in, be it the people, the surroundings the work, the relationships, the inward and the outward appearance, which eventually lead us to hate our own world.
This documentary showcased a family of five where two of them are children. The documentary mostly focused around the elder child Ben although it also talked about his younger sister who is in depression because of social media as the documentary implied. It claimed self approval in social media sites is increasing the numbers of self harming activities of girls in the United State.
In today’s world social media has become stronger as ever. It has positive effect, but on today’s younger generation, their positive impacts have been minimized as compared to their negative impacts. Social media is known as the cool trend among young generation. Their day to day life activities are organized by social media. They can have communication and conversation with the near and dear ones by using different media and devices at any moment of their lives. We can also notice that people are now contact with not only known friends but also with unknown through there social media platforms youngsters are addicted to this.
Best we can do if we can’t quit social media which is inside your head that is not real and it doesn’t account for anything in the real world. Also switch off the notification of the apps that are not of utmost essential in your daily life like, Instagram, snapchat, Facebook etc. Notification tempt you to open and be a product for these apps which earns money.
The key belief we all hold is that such companies are selling user’s data but the reality is something else, they are creating our prototype to manipulate us and our actions. It gradually changing our behaviour and our perception. One of the truth which conveys that unfortunately breaching privacy, manipulation and addictions are not bugs but features of our favourite social media platforms.
What we can do, after being aware of the manipulative patterns of these social media platforms:
• Turn off the unnecessary notification.
• Unfollow things which do not add value in your life.
• Stop the spread of fake news by knowing more about the news from trusted source.
• Aware people about the patterns of these social media platforms.
• Now deleting our social media account could be a thing we could do, but by going away from the problem doesn’t solve the issue, it is still there, this need to be solved. People should be aware of how these platforms run and what is happening behind the screen because no one wants to be manipulated. People should start questioning the people who are running these big tech companies until its too late.
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