The insipid tale of The Social Dilemma
How Netflix’s new documentary doesn’t offer anything new
When I started watching The Social Dilemma, I was expecting groundbreaking revelations. But fifteen minutes into it and the documentary only goes on to tell us how as social media users, we are being watched, listened to, and manipulated by the tech-giants. Talk about preaching to the choir! Ironically, the platform(Netflix) that the movie is on, also makes sure that we spend an extensive amount of time on it by bludgeoning us with a flurry of content. Reed Hastings, CEO, Netflix, once famously said, “Sleep is our biggest competition.”
To put things in context, The Social Dilemma is a new documentary on Netflix from Jeff Orlowski where ex-employees of Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest sound the alarm on their own creation and how they never expected the social media dragon to turn people into a bunch of addicts. Really?
I am sympathetic to the concerns raised by those ex-employees but also inert to what they are professing. My inert reaction to the documentary comes from the reason that we are no longer shocked. After the revelations of American whistle-blower Edward Snowden in 2013 that intelligence agencies tap phone records and track online activities of the people in the US, it’s difficult to be shocked by anything now.
The documentary genre became popular from the time Michael Moore came out with ‘Fahrenheit 9/11’ which was essentially a documentary on media manipulation during the Iraq War (and much more). Generally, documentaries lay down raw footage and facts in front of the viewer and let them choose a perspective or decide how they need to react to the revelations. But over a while, documentary as a genre has become this agenda-driven, manipulative tool to colour our judgment. A part of that has happened because it’s shot in a scripted manner, with ominous background music and the whistle-blower looks like they have been paid a lot of money to come forward to sort of reveal what they know or to exaggerate what they know.
I am ambivalent about the claim that the creator of the ‘like’ feature on Facebook makes that he never imagined that it would one day start affecting the mental health if people don’t get enough likes on their pictures. I am doubtful about how these stalwarts had never foreseen a ‘tech-xploitation’ in the form of abuse, bullying, and propaganda on their platform. I am not sure how they didn’t know people will, on their own, find out about algorithms and data collection and surveillance. We do one Google search on ‘holiday in goa’ and seconds later we are presented with hotel options in Goa on our social networks.
There is a mere mention of it, but The Social Dilemma should also have touched upon how WhatsApp, which is owned by Facebook, has become the purveyor of fake news in India and responsible for propaganda related deaths and unsettling tensions between people of different faiths. If such high-profile ex-employees were put on camera to talk about the problems with social networks, it would have been better to also discuss the solutions to tackle them. The screen-time feature being one of the solutions. People are smarter than tech companies think. There is a strong possibility that after a decade none of today’s social media networks might exist and the consumer may form their community-based networks or the one that is information exposure proof.
The Social Dilemma might be an eye-opener for many who did not read about this subject in detail over the years. For me, it misses the nuance or the productive advice that might save us from the dystopian era that we are headed to.
