I watched The Social Dilemma on Netflix and have a few thoughts. (If you don’t want to read the whole review, and you saw it, there is one MAJOR piece of the work that, while I liked it, is a substantial fail in my opinion, starting at the word “Finally….” about half way down.)
No matter what, it's worth a watch. But like my major issue with the film, it's OUR responsibility to be emotionally and mentally healthy if we're going to watch this.
The documentary mostly features about 10-15 mostly former mid to senior level execs at a variety of social media companies. They describe the technological behind the scenes workings of Facebook, Twitter, Insta, etc. and how they hook deeply into us.
Alongside that, there’s a fictional story of how this impacts a family. I suppose it’s meant to demonstrate its damage in a real-world family. (sort of how What the Bleep Do We Know? Worked)
The main message is Social Media is a well-designed giant algorithm optimized to revenue and engagement. It’s a pretty venomous way to divide us and potentially damage our mental and emotional health. It brings up contextual stats about suicide amongst teenagers and how this impacts their image based on “likes” or comments for example.
To be fair, nearly everyone mentions how there are potentially positive aspects to the technology in terms of connecting us in ways never considered at scale.
I liken social media apps to the tobacco and smart phones the ultimate cigarette or tobacco delivery system. They work perfectly together to keep the endorphin drip delivering.
I had a few reactions to the movie:
First, the film does a great job using simple ways to explain how the algorithms work. It also does a terrific job of explaining how they are calmly, coolly, and CONSTANTLY working at a scale that is beyond our wildest imaginations.
They made a clear linkage between the fact that the reason most don’t particularly care about its effectiveness, or actually WANT it to be effective, is because of the ad dollars associated with it.
Second I couldn’t help but think of Napster. So many people freaked out about Napster because it created an incredibly easy interface to do something at scale that some ended up being uncomfortable with. Because it impacted companies they were incentivized to stop it, so they did.
This is the reverse. Social Media works SO well at scale that the companies are actually disincentivized (big word) to stop, so they won’t.
Third, it was fascinating that nearly every single person interviewed was white, mostly white men. (They shoehorned in a black dad into the fictional family.) I’m not accusing the filmmaker of racism. Rather it’s just fascinating that the entire lens is through the looking glass of mostly white males.
There were a few times where the interviewees pointed to the beneficial aspects of social media. And given our current environment I would have wanted to hear it through a few more lenses.
That being said, white men are comparatively highly representative of the types of folks who are in leadership positions in these companies.
FINALLY, while it’s an interesting and useful piece of work that I think we all should watch, there’s a GIANT missing piece of the puzzle.
There is a dozen of mentions in the film about how Social Media is crushing our collective mental health, including our kids. But here’s the thing, there’s a simple and powerful way to combat all of that: WORK ON OUR S**T.
We would really benefit from getting help. There's almost nobody I've ever met that hasn't at some point either explicitly admitted or implicitly shown that help wouldn't help.
I think the film does a grave injustice in that it makes us hopeless victims whose only answer is to rebel against social media and choose a new, different social media approach. Well that misses the point too.
Put in easy terms, how much would social media impact us all if we all were emotionally and mentally healthy?
Would we be able to see others success (real or not) and celebrate it rather than be quietly envious of it?
Would we regularly crush each other for our political, societal, religious, etc. views rather than seek to understand each other, even if we disagree?
Would we get angsty about how many likes and comments our pictures and written items get?
Would we hold back on sharing at “scale” the reality of the difficulties we face?
The answer is super simple in my mind: We wouldn’t.
As for our children, the answer in my mind is not to take the devices away. Isn’t it better to have an open and honest conversation about how our kids are doing? I told Zoe from VERY early on in her interactions with Social Media (and still do) to remember that not everything that is posted out there is REAL.
Some of it might be and hooray for that!
I consider it a fail to push out a piece of content like this without considering that bigger picture and having it focus 90% on the alarmist trend that most of us in a very short period of time would agree with.
Here’s the deal my friends. In my mind, our reaction to and participation in social media comes with it a responsibility to be mature, healthy adults (so as in life). It’s also our responsibility to talk to our kids about it.
Social media is not destroying and dividing us. SO many of us aren’t emotionally and mentally healthy and haven’t healed gong INTO Social Media.
Social Media AMPLIFIES our divisiveness, it’s doesn’t CREATE it.
Calling the companies that run it evil simply because they work algorithms to optimize for dollars (that many of us benefit from in one way or another) is weak. I’m all for learning the way the machine works.
But even if I don’t how the big machines works, if my personal machine is optimized for mental and emotional health, it doesn’t matter how effective the big machine is, I’m good.
Is it unrealistic for me to think that people will be emotionally healthy? Yep. And that’s not an excuse to not address it.