Our Social Dilemma
The Social Dilemma is a 2020 documentary by Jeff Orlowski addressing how social networks are causing harm to the human psyche. Tech creators from Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest and Google all give insight into the harm that social media has caused to society and how it continues to exploit its users regardless of what the lasting effect is. As someone who has grown up seeing the birth of social media, the issues they talked about were not exactly too surprising. However, seeing how much social networks extort or manipulate its users was pretty shocking. And realizing that a lot of the tech creators just went with it to make a profit.
What Resonated
The biggest scene from the documentary was the when the mom of the example family had everyone place their phones into a time-lock container to encourage them to communicate with each other while they ate dinner. As the mom set the timer for an hour, she joins the rest of the family and they just sat there in silence. Any time you heard a phone vibrate, you could see the two younger children look over, feeling the FOMO set in. The dad, as any dad would, tries to start a conversation about politics, something he probably spends a lot of his screen time reading about. Not even 5 minutes into the phones being locked up, the youngest daughter gets ups, stating she needed another fork. The next thing you know, we hear a shatter and the family turns to see that she smashed the container to get her phone. While some people may take this as a bit of an exaggeration, I wouldn’t put it past this being a reality for a family out there.
There have been plenty of times when my mom would get mad at me and my brothers in high school because we couldn’t part with our phones during dinner. At home, she would give us stern looks if we tried to do something on our phone while eating, stating it was family time. If we were out to dinner, we weren’t even allowed to pull them out of our pockets. As we’ve gotten older, she has become less strict which kind of makes me sad; most dinners, she’s even guilty of sitting there scrolling through her phone. Even before seeing The Social Dilemma, I’ve tried to be more aware of using my phone at dinner when I’m eating with others so as not to be that person scrolling.
Social Distortion
The Social Dilemma brings up the topic of how social media distorts our reality. They show the younger daughter posting a selfie but deleting it after a few minutes because it didn’t get enough engagement in the first couple of minutes. She then uses an app to make the selfie look more altered in the hopes to get more engagement. Within seconds of posting it, she receives more likes and comments, both positive and negative. Even though more people had nice things to say, she chose to focus more on the comment about her ears. She becomes more self-conscious, looking in the mirror to fix her hair to hide her ears. This is the reality that a lot of people experience with every post they make. With the existence of friends, there are those online that sit there looking to troll or post negative comments on social media posts.
We’re told we have to look a certain way to get the most engagement online. There were times in high school where I felt I didn’t look good because I didn’t look the way other people in my class looked in their posts online. It did eat away at me for a good bit of high and into college. Luckily, I had enough people in my life that helped me out of the mindset and I make it a purpose to never find myself back there. But not everyone is so lucky. It was very shocking to see the statistics about how many teenage girls were admitted to hospitals over suicidal thoughts or attempts as well as the number of suicides.
Another thing that social networks allows is for the user to be whoever they want online. We can manipulate what other’s think of us by having a different personality and hide our true personalities. When I was a junior in high school, our family chose to host a French exchange student. For the month before they arrived, we talked online through Facebook Messanger. It was easy and we had great conversations but once they arrived it felt more awkward; in real life, I was more introverted and it wasn’t as easy to keep a conversation. The idea of having a different personality online can cause people to not want to actually interact offline and tech companies realize that.
Outsmarting AI
Another thing that stuck out was the topic of screen time spent on our phones. This has been a recent update in the last few years. I know for Apple products, they release a “report” every Sunday either saying your screen time has gone up or down from the previous week. This is a good feature to have in my opinion so that users are aware of just how much time they are spending on their phones on average. If you click on the report, they lay out where your time has been spent. For most, the time is spent on social networks. I’ve had my mom constantly telling me how dad’s weekly reports are always so high. She complains about how much time he spends sitting around with the TV on and scrolling on her phone. I find it funny, because half the time I’m sitting with her watching something, she’s doing the same thing.
I think it’s great that they put out a weekly report. For those that care how much time they spend on their phones, we become aware of where we spend our time and, if we want to, can set limits for certain things. However, for those that just see it as another notification to ignore, it doesn’t bring much awareness.
Overall, the topics they talked about weren’t that surprising. Over the last year, so much of the media warned about the dangers of TikTok claiming “China has all your information.” Our response: “So?” I find this so funny because The Social Dilemma has proven that every social network has our information. The only issue that media hated was the fact that it wasn’t a US based company with that information.
I’m hoping that our society will become more aware of how much social networks manipulate its users and more people move towards creating a solution to the problem.
