The Social Dilemma: Reality Check of Social

A Documentary Peeling The Secret Layers of Social Media

Lucy I am that I got an opportunity to see ‘ The Social Dilemma’, a wonderful documentary by 



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Lot of talks are in public space that social media is of addictive and creepy nature.  Those who spend hours together on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and the like can vouch it. But in Jeff Orlowski’s documentary “The Social Dilemma,” conscientious defectors from these social media big wigs  explain that the perniciousness of social networking platforms is an inbuilt feature, not a bug.

They also claim that the manipulation of human behavior for profit is coded into these companies with Machiavellian precision: Infinite scrolling and push notifications keep users constantly engaged; personalized recommendations use data not just to predict but also to influence our actions, turning users into easy prey for advertisers and propagandists.

Orlowski’s previous documentaries about climate change, “Chasing Ice” and “Chasing Coral” reveal a reality that can seem too colossal and abstract for a layperson to grasp, let alone care about, and scales it down to a human level. In “The Social Dilemma,” he recasts one of the oldest tropes of the horror genre — Dr. Frankenstein, the scientist who went too far — for the digital age.

The movie opens with a quote from Sophocles: “Nothing vast enters the life of mortals without a curse.” And the veterans of Silicon Valley weigh in with tales of good intentions from the early days of social media (prior to its own vastness) even as they paint a bleak picture of the current situation. As former Google and Facebook engineer Justin Rosenstein points out, the latter’s “like” button was designed to be a tool for spreading “positivity and love,” not the behavioral tracking device it has become.

Tristan Harris, a former design ethicist at Google and co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology, is the movie’s driving force as he attempts to appeal to tech companies’ better angels. It is Harris who notes that the “dilemma” is that social media and related apps simultaneously offer utopia and dystopia. They bring out the best and the worst in society. They make so many things so easy, but at what cost?

In briskly edited interviews, Orlowski speaks with men and (a few) women who helped build social media and now fear the effects of their creations on users’ mental health and the foundations of democracy. They deliver their cautionary testimonies with the force of a start-up pitch, employing crisp aphorisms and pithy analogies.

Never before in history have 50 designers made decisions that would have an impact on two billion people,” says Tristan Harris, a former design ethicist at Google. Anna Lembke, an addiction expert at Stanford University, explains that these companies exploit the brain’s evolutionary need for interpersonal connection. And Roger McNamee, an early investor in Facebook, delivers a chilling allegation: Russia didn’t hack Facebook; it simply used the platform.

Much of this is familiar, but “The Social Dilemma” goes the extra explainer-mile by interspersing the interviews with P.S.A.-style fictional scenes of a suburban family suffering the consequences of social-media addiction. There are silent dinners, a pubescent daughter (Sophia Hammons) with self-image issues and a teenage son (Skyler Gisondo) who’s radicalized by YouTube recommendations promoting a vague ideology.

Ofcourse, fictionalized narrative in the documentary exemplifies the

limitations of its  sometimes hyperbolic emphasis on the medium at the expense of the message. For instance, the movie’s interlocutors pin an increase in mental illness on social media usage yet don’t acknowledge factors like a rise in economic insecurity. Polarization, riots and protests are presented as particular symptoms of the social-media era without historical context.

Despite their vehement criticisms, the interviewees in “The Social Dilemma” are not all doomsayers; many suggest that with the right changes, we can salvage the good of social media without the bad. But the grab bag of personal and political solutions they present in the film confuses two distinct targets of critique: the technology that causes destructive behaviors and the culture of unchecked capitalism that produces it.

Nevertheless, “The Social Dilemma” is remarkably effective in sounding the alarm about the incursion of data mining and manipulative technology into our social lives and beyond. Orlowski’s film is itself not spared by the phenomenon it scrutinizes. 

The real Dilemma of the documentary is that it is streaming on Netflix, where it’ll become another node in the service’s data-based algorithm ! 

But it is a must watch for people glued with social media.