The SOCIAL DILEMMA – Understanding Social Media

The SOCIAL DILEMMA is a movie released on Netflix and it focuses on the misuse of data by various tech giants. This movie discusses different ways in which various social media and social networking companies have manipulated human psychology and what this means for society in general.

Data is the new oil – This phrase was coined by Clive Humby in the year 2006, so insightful! In the upcoming century, this will be the most relevant phrase and it is very important for all of us to wrap our heads around this idea!

So many of you now may think that what can be done from my browsing data?
Well, the thing is if you don’t buy the product then you are the product! The phrase simply means that your psychology is being hacked just like a normal computer hacking but the difference is, this is way more dangerous!

Whenever we browse something on our browser, then everything relevant to that automatically comes up on our different social media platforms. This goes on to show that everything we do is recorded and stored somewhere and this data is not managed by humans but by Artificial Intelligent agents! The scariest part is the engineers working in these data centers, they themselves don’t understand the technology completely i.e. we are controlled by machines!

This all started in the past decade when different social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and many more, came into existence. While the usage of artificial agents used for data handling is something engineers have been trying for quite some time now and this will be very helpful in the future but the question is will humans still be there? Because machines have been controlling human beings through this social media!

Consider an example of Instagram, once we start scrolling the feed more often than not we end up wasting more time than what we initially decide. This is because the feed is updated according to our choices and how do they understand our choice? Through our browsing data which is stored on their server and then, in turn, that same data is used against us.

Thus, it would be fair to say that we are caged! If we don’t control ourselves then there is no way out of this mess and these things are shown in the movie in the form of an interview given by none other than the creators of social platforms.

Side effects of Social media on personal health:

No uninterrupted sleep on many days in a row.
Very little or No family time leads to depression.

How is this social media affecting our society?
The balance in society is completely changing because of fake news spread using social media platforms.
Fake news spreads faster as compared to genuine news as many people nowadays prefer social media platforms rather than traditional newspapers.

Thus, this movie warns us about the excessive use of social media.
So to conclude to save ourselves from this mess we have to be self-disciplined and then according to our conscience, we should decide what is good and what is harmful.