The Social Dilemma

During the past two class meetings we have been watching "The Social Dilemma" which is a short documentary distributed by Netflix. This documentary was released in September 2020 and was directed by Jeff Orlowski. I have seen clips of "The Social Dilemma" on TikTok before, but I never sat down and watched the full documentary before this class.

I normally am not the type of person who likes to sit down and watch a documentary in class because I always get tired and distracted. However, this documentary somehow enthralled me and I was intrigued the whole time while watching it. Throughout "The Social Dilemma" we hear from many experts who previously worked in the social media field and now want to inform users of the dangers that social media brings. The main theme of this documentary seems to be how severely addicting all social media platforms are and how these networks manipulate their users to purposefully become addicted to their phones for the company's benefit. 

The social media experts explain how these companies purposefully create strategies to increase the usage of their platforms. They don't care that they are creating addictive habits. All that matters to them is creating a strategic plan that will benefit them in the end. One of the tech experts spoke about how these platforms want users to go down rabbit holes on certain topics so that the algorithm can only make them dig deeper into this obsession with a topic. 

One of the moments that really stuck out to me was when they used the illustration of a family sitting down to eat dinner together. The mother decides that they will have a no-phone dinner. She takes all of the phones and puts them into a lockbox with a timer for one hour. The kids begin to freak out at the mother for taking their phones. They spend the rest of their dinner in silence because they do not know how to hold conversations without their phones. The younger daughter decides to sneak away from the table and break open the lockbox to get her phone and go to her room. 

While I do think that this situation is a little bit exaggerated, I think that it is a good representation of how much our society is addicted to our phones. My family has a very strict rule of no phones at the dinner table. We have had this rule for as long as I can remember, but I have noticed that my parents have gotten more lenient with this rule over the past few years. Although we don't sit on our phones all the time during dinner, we sometimes will pull the devices out for a moment to check a notification. Perhaps we should think about leaving all of our devices in a separate room so that we can truly connect as a family.

This was an extremely intriguing documentary and it really helped put this issue into perspective for me. I will be the first to admit I am addicted to my device. I am constantly wanting to check to see if I receive new notifications and the second I am away from my phone I am wondering what I am missing. I think it is so important to ground ourselves in reality away from technology and begin to find true and authentic human connections. I believe that everyone should watch "The Social Dilemma" so that we can see and understand the issue presented and find a way to use social media for a better, less-toxic purpose.