Written by Sophia Staffiero
Reading time: 5 minutes
Jeff Orlowski’s recent documentary The Social Dilemma on Netflix has been described as an essential ‘wake-up call for a world drunk on dopamine’, I couldn’t agree more. The documentary is, amongst many things, an exploration into how social media has become increasingly engineered into an intentionally addictive apparatus that is, as a result, ruining our real life human connection. Running parallel to a series of interviews with the top tech wizards behind the likes of Facebook, Google, Instagram, and Pinterest (to name a few) is a very realistic, fictional portrayal of a family’s young children’s addiction to social media.
It was interesting to watch this documentary along with my two younger sisters, who amongst us spread the span of two different generations (Millennial and Generation Z) and with that, carry very different experiences of technology’s involvement in our everyday lives. While I can still remember the sound of dial-up internet that characterised my early children, my youngest sister who is currently 12 has the nintendo generations evolution as her reference point. It was clear through our post-discussion that the form and intensity of our technology usage shaped our views on the documentary, as well as what we each identified as the key arguments.
Some of the essential discussions which emerged from the documentary for me included the commodification of audience attention, with social media platform essentially selling viewers’ attention as a product to paying corporations. As one of the interviewees, Andrew Lewis, states, in the tech world, ‘if you are not paying for the product you are the product.‘
What naturally arises from this discussion are the hefty contentions surrounding Artificial Intelligence and the ethical implications of utilising algorithms to manipulate ‘users’ (how much agency do we really possess in these situations to be called ‘users’?) to think and be programmed in a certain way, which is profitable to the paying organisation. The conversation takes a sticky turn when we sit to reflect on the fact that we are all, in some way, implicated in this mechanism. Take, for example, YouTube content creators who opt into have monetising ads on their videos, equally selling our attention to these corporations – we have to question, how ethical is this? And perhaps, more pertinent for myself, how do we, as winter’s bloom fit into this space? I am acutely aware that we rely on social media and it has always been an internal conflict for me that we are utilising platforms which, though may not have inherently been created for manipulation, undeniably are successful because of user manipulation.
What this documentary reminds us, is that it is also important to bear in mind the wider implication of this ‘virtual world’ as it goes beyond planting seeds for someone to buy the latest trainers, even beyond the issue of spying/ privacy. The virtual sphere is creating ripple effects in the real world by influencing how a larger percentage of the world population think and interact with the information they are fed. The examples we are provided with range from typing in google ‘climate change is…’ and receiving a personalised answer based on your geolocation or what good knows about your views (e.g. climate change is a hoax vs climate change is disrupting ecosystems), to Russia’s influence in US 2016 Presidential election.
And so, we are left with the pregnant question which looms throughout the entirety of the documentary: is there such a thing as humane technology? And if so, how does it compete against the current operation systems? Questions, it seems, that still require answers.
Featured Photo by CinemaBlend
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