Netflix has recently released a documentary titled ‘The Social Dilemma’. The documentary highlights how social media companies are deliberately making their platforms more addictive for their users. The companies are spending millions of dollars to keep their users hooked to their platforms. This has resulted in a society which is unable to focus on the task at hand, has become more radicalized, with less tolerance for differences, and bent on sharing whatever information they acquire, without even feeling the need to authenticate what they are sharing.
This is not the first documentary on this topic. Last year Netflix released a similar documentary, The Great Hack. That documentary showed how results of US presidential elections were influenced through social media. The documentary specifically focused on how misinformation was spread through social media and there were practically no regulatory tools to check and govern the information on these social media sites.
The worrying thing is that despite these things now coming to the public knowledge, there is almost no impact of this on the general public and their use of social media. People just carry on with their lives as usual.
The Dilemma
The real dilemma is that these social media sites were built with a positive social objective. To connect the world. They help their users connect and share stuff even when geography separates them. They help businesses reach their audiences in a cost effective manner. Millions of people benefit by networking with others; some of whom they wouldn’t have otherwise come across in their daily routines.
Yet despite all these benefits, social media platforms now present us with 2 big challenges which eclipse all their benefits.
1. FOCUS
Today our youth specially, and the public generally has lost the capacity to focus on the task at hand. An average teen has attention span of about 28 seconds only. In the past students were accustomed to attending a text for a longer period of time. Without the ability to focus, we are rapidly losing our ability to interpret, analyze, critique, and come to conclusion about information.
We all know that feeling when we are scrolling down the social media feed for some time, only to realize that it has been hours; while we are unable to pay the same level of attention to our office work, or assigned readings, or to have meaningful conversations with our loved ones. Any social gathering, and at one point smartphones slip out of our pockets into our hands, and we just ‘zone out’.
2. PERSONALITY MODIFICATION
Social media has modified behaviors of people at a scale never imagined before. A number of studies have classified excessive use of social media as addiction. There are engineers and psychologists from top notch universities of the world, working round the clock at these social media companies, trying to make their apps more addictive, to make you spend more time on their platform, to come back to their site again, to repeatedly check your phone throughout the day. These social media apps are being ‘designed to be addictive‘. Yet no regulator has yet stepped up to call for a mechanism to regulate these apps.
These social media apps have altered the reality for all of us. People now compare worth of each other through their social media feeds, through the likes or lack thereof, through the number of followers one has.
There was once a time people used to record their thoughts on diaries. But then, they tried to make sure that no one ever read what they had written. Personal diary was a very confidential item. Now, in this war for more likes and to become more popular, social media addicts spill their hearts out on these platforms without even caring for whether what they are sharing is true or not, or what effect it might have on anyone, let alone think about confidentiality or sensitivity of the matter. All that matters is how much likes and reacts does one get in response to the their posts.
As with anything that involves human beings, we face 2 options.
- We have the choice to realize that this excessive use of social media is a threat to our mental health, to our social fabric, and to our ability to offer a positive contribution to ourselves, our family, and our society. Thus, social media usage needs to be regulated reduced if not eliminated.
- There is this other option too, which we seem to have chosen, at least for now; to bury our heads in the sand, to deny that the problem exists and go about our daily routines, addicted to social media, pretending all is well.
The choice is ours.