Review of “The Social Dilemma”
The Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma raises awareness about what technology and social media are doing to society. Most of the documentary serves as a wake-up call and aims to scare us a little bit. It is structured in a way that delivers the point of view of many founders, presidents, and workers of powerful social media companies, as well as communicating these viewpoints through a relatable fictional storyline.
This storyline involves a family with three kids, the main character being a high schooler named Ben. Right off the bat, teenagers watching this movie will immediately relate to this character. I believe this documentary’s target audience is both teenagers and adults.
The first idea that is brought up is from a Harvard Business School professor about the quote “If you’re not paying for the product, then you are the product.” Ever wonder why Snapchat, Facebook, and all those other platforms don’t cost money? We aren’t paying, because advertisers are paying them in exchange for the companies showing their ads to us. We are the product because our attention is the thing being sold to advertisers. This is a great way to kick off the film because this claim alone is something that draws us in and something that teenagers should be aware of. The companies want to make money, so they make sure these ads are interesting to us. This brings us to another major topic of the documentary: Artificial Intelligence.
Jeff Seibert, an entrepreneur and angel investor, worries the audience by telling us that every single thing we do on our phones is being recorded. AI knows exactly what we’re seeing on our screens, when we’re looking at it, and even how long we’re looking at it. It collects data and over time gets better and better at predicting what we want to see to keep us on our phones longer. The documentary creatively expresses AI as one actor playing 3 different parts of the goals of AI in a sort of game-show setting, all focusing on Ben. These 3 goals are engagement, growth, and advertisement. Engagement is what keeps Ben scrolling through his feed, growth is the effort to spread the information to other users to expand the amount of people on apps, and advertising in order to make money. The AI actors illustrate the “thought” process of AI seeking Ben’s attention and say things like “He likes football, let’s show him this post” or “He used to have a crush on this girl, let’s send him a suggestion to follow her on Instagram.” This is the same kind of process that occurs behind our screens.
Artificial intelligence intentionally makes you anxious. The ellipsis that appears when someone else is typing is designed to make you anxious and be on your screen for longer. Notifications pop up and cool noises and vibrations immediately grab your attention and urge you to check your phone because there could be a chance that you see something that leads to a release of dopamine. One of the interviewed people in the tech industry described it as a “slot machine effect” because there is a chance that when you pick up your phone there could be something exciting, but there is also a chance that there could be nothing and that feels like a negative outcome. The want for something to be there that triggers a dopamine release becomes addictive. I think many of my friends and other people my age would be able to relate to this and should have this realization too.
Gen Z as a whole has experienced increased anxiety and depression, as well as a fear of taking risks. In fact, the rate of teenagers getting their driver’s licenses is dropping as well as the percentage of people going out on dates or having any kind of romantic interactions. Even more concerning, self-harm and suicide rates in teenage girls have gone up exponentially since the rise of social media. Particularly in ages 10-14, which is just beyond awful. Parents should watch this documentary and be exposed to this information because I can’t imagine any parents wanting their kids to feel manipulated by technology, become anxious, compare themselves to impossible beauty standards, and experience other negative outcomes.
The documentary then comes back to Ben, who agrees to stay off his phone for just one week to prove it’s not a problem. However, it was a problem, because on day 3 he stole it back. He plunges into a deep state of distracted focus by being on his screen for hours. He stops caring about everything that he cared about in his life outside of his phone. His friends, his family, getting to school on time, he’s just completely consumed by his phone at all times and is in what seems like a depressive state.
The last big topic in this documentary is that social media has created a way to manipulate public opinion, and it can lead to violence. Fake news on the internet leads people to believe things that aren’t true, but how can we know what to believe? AI doesn’t know the difference between truth and conspiracy theory. Political views have shifted incredibly due to social media. Political opinions or information posted on social media can provoke strong emotions in people, therefore creating unrest and a difference of opinions based on the post and what political party it is influenced by. One disastrous example of social media leading to violence was the Myanmar genocide a few years ago.
Ben accidentally finds himself in a not-so-peaceful protest and realizes the consequences of reading fake news on social media. The film ends with Tristan Harris and the other members of the tech industry explaining that they didn’t intend for this to happen. Likes and comments on Facebook and Instagram are supposed to bring positivity and kindness, not create anxiety and depression and a world of political polarization. They explain that the existential threat that is occurring is not social media and technology itself, it is “technology’s ability to bring out the worst in society.”
We should be worried about future generations because AI is only going to grow from here. If we continue on this trajectory, trees will still be cut down, climate change will go unsolved, and life itself could be sucked into the void of artificial intelligence. The makers of this excellent documentary encourage us to change the world before it’s too late. Resist the recommended videos on YouTube, and ignore the notifications that pop up on your screen so we can focus on the good parts of technology and create a better world for us and our future generations.
In conclusion, I think this is an incredible documentary and does a great job delivering information in such a way that evokes emotion and makes the audience question their own actions, beliefs, and habits. I find myself still thinking about these topics days after I watched the film.
Something that really stuck out to me was the growing numbers of kids and teenagers having anxiety and depression and the rising rates of self-harm and suicide due to the rise of social media. Mental health is something that does not get enough attention, and that needs to change or else things will only get worse. I would recommend this documentary to all ages because I feel like anyone could benefit from learning about how technology is affecting us. The fictional storyline is not only relatable but does a great job presenting the data we just learned about in a real-life scenario, highlighting the full extent of the issue.