The Social Dilemma
Review by sajida farheen farhee
A documentary on Netflix "The Social Dilemma" has gained a lot of popularity. The interviewees in this documentary are people who have served in high positions at Google, Facebook, YouTube and other social network companies. And experiments and analyzes cannot be rejected in any case
The documentary starts with a fictional family story about how social media affects our lives.
But the other side of social media which we call the negative side is very scary and if we don't try to fix it, it can spoil our present as well as the future. The future of social media is also at risk Children who use social media are more prone to mental problems The use of filtered selfies among young boys and girls has increased to such an extent that plastic surgeons have coined a new term, Snapchat. Dysmorphia is named because these young children, especially girls, are trying to make their faces look like their filtered selfies through plastic surgery.
Mobile phones have become more and more important in our lives
Another thing that this documentary talks about is fake news. Millions of people in all countries of the world are connected to social media, which makes up billions in total. In the world of social media, apparently. People are connected to each other which in reality is nothing more than a mirage. Frequent news in social media increases our excitement and there is a large number of such news which can be called fake news and these fake news make social media trends.
Former Google Design Ethicist Tristan Harris says, "If you ask people what they complain about today's technology, what will they say?" Their answer will be that fake news has increased, their data and personal information is being stolen, elections are being stolen. The example of stealing elections may or may be of other types in our countries, but in modern democratic countries, turning attitudes and reactions in a certain direction is actually election manipulation. Many people have seen the Matrix movie? In that film, people are living in a giant matrix but they don't realize it, just like we all are badly trapped in the matrix of technology but we don't realize it.
The third thing that is mentioned in the documentary is social media addiction, that social media makes us addicted to it, we don't even know it and we become addicted to it, the same chemicals that come out of the mind when using a chemical drug, to use social media. When someone likes our post and makes good comments on it, dopamine hormone is released in our brain. When we don't get comments and likes, we start to get depressed because we are used to likes. You might not have thought that likes, comments and appreciation are nothing less than oxygen for most social media users and the lack of likes doesn't bother them. Can be psychologically depressing. Inattention on social media can lead to suicide A new study proves that social media use is directly related to psychological and mental disorders.
Social media is by no means free-of-charge
All these social media networks are competing with each other for your attention
This documentary states that if you don't pay for a product, you are a product, your time spent on social media is a product for the people they sell.
Social media networks inject your own thoughts into your brain, changing your behavior, changing your outlook, and changing your thinking.
And the fourth thing that is shown in this documentary is that we don't know that they use our data and use it against us.
Everything you see on social media is monitored and tracked
Measured Tested Your every little to big activity is recorded Monitored
When you are scrolling on any social media networks Facebook etc. you are also being noted how long you spend looking at what you see.
What did you like or dislike? What did you share?
So that they can understand your personality, they test and recognize you through it, they know your mood, when you are happy, when you are unhappy, when you are depressed, they know everything, these social media networks are more than us. know about
Social media networks analyze your net data and use your information to create a digital profile of you, called Artificial Intelligence AI, which predicts your online views and then suggests what content you should watch. and it is presented to you
And the social media company that creates the most complete digital model of us, the better it earns, the more they know when we're going to do it.
Artificial Intelligence is a computer program that
It has the ability to learn by itself
And even more so on its own, the system is making money for social media companies
Often these AI show us the same content over and over again and they don't care if it affects us positively or negatively. The only goal is to keep us engaged with the screen. They succeed. You must have noticed. Sometimes we pick up the phone for a minute of thinking and we don't even realize that we use the phone for an hour.
Former Google Design Ethicist Tristan Harris
He says, "When I was in Google, I was in the Gmail department, and all the time we used to discuss how his inbox should look like, how his front should be, what his background color should be. This was to make people spend more time on Gmail. The decisions of the people there make billions of people around the world dance on their toes. My routine was to come home from office every day and spend about two to three hours, I would make a presentation on Gmail about how Gmail should look so that we keep people busy but not addicted to it and my colleagues also agreed with this idea and This somehow reached the Google CEO "Larry Page" who also supported my idea, but days passed and it could not be implemented.
When you type something to search on Google, Google gives you different autofill options as you search.
In fact, what you are thinking is what you search for, what you read or want to read, so what is it? already decided . everything The good interesting thing is that Google also shows search results separately for each region, the same is the case with our YouTube videos because this AI keeps us and our trends better than us.
The fifth thing this documentary talks about is the ongoing conditioning of our brains
Social media networks are programming our mind, they are also programming our subconscious mind and we don't even know it. We don't even realize how much time we have invested in any action that you do involuntarily until your law is consciously programmed to control your mind and change your behavior. Your thoughts, ideas and thoughts are changed and you don't even realize it. And these social media networks use you for their own benefit and that is to say, those people who have been in high positions in these social media companies for a long time. have been
According to Sandy Paraklas, a former operations manager at Facebook and a product manager at Uber, only a handful of people at Facebook, Twitter or other companies understand how these systems work, and even those people are completely ignorant of it. The system is unable to understand how a particular part of a particular formula is working or is working. The logical conclusion of this is that as human beings we have almost lost control over these systems and more systems are controlling us than we are running.
“Everybody at Facebook in 2006, including me, was very impressed by Google,” says Tim Kendall, former Facebook executive, former president of Print Rust, and CEO of Movement. We envied the way he built himself up and became a money-making machine. Two years after Facebook's launch, I was brought in as director of monetization. So that I can monetize Facebook.
Jaren Lanier, the founder of virtual reality computer science, says that companies like Facebook or Google are the richest and most successful companies in the world. There is no example of their success in the past. Interestingly, the number of employees of these companies is not very high because they rely on supercomputers. So the question arises that what are they getting money for? What do they sell?
Roger Mackin is one of the early investors in Facebook. According to him, in the first 50 years of Silicon Valley, companies were building and selling products. They used to sell products like hardware, software etc. to their customers and earn money but now since last ten years technology companies in Silicon Valley are selling to their customers.
Iza Ruskin, a former employee of Mozilla Firefox and Mozilla Labs, co-founder of the Center for Human Technology, says that because we, the consumers, do not pay for the products we are using, advertisers pay for those products. So the simple point is that the advertisers are the customers of these products (social media) and we the consumers are the goods that are being sold as the old saying goes, “If you are not paying for a product. If so, you are actually the product or item for sale.
"If you are not paying for the product then you are the product."
A former design executive at Google says that most people think that Facebook is a place to post pictures of yourself and your friends, and that Google is not just a search engine, because in fact all these companies are in a kind of race to see who How to maximize your screen time and get your attention.
According to former Twitter executive Jeff Seibert, it's all about the marketing world where your attention is being sold as a product, and it all takes data. Your data. What do you think, what do you like, what videos do you watch, what do you like to read, which video or which photo did you watch for how long. It's all data and it's all artificial intelligence or AI that creates a virtual image of you, without exaggeration, every human being. It makes it possible to predict the future ie how you think, when you can react, what you like to wear, they know when you are happy, when you are sad etc. People have a misconception that their data is sold. Not only does it suit big companies including Facebook to sell data, but as mentioned earlier, they create a virtual model of you through this data and the better the model, the more successful it will be.
How and how successfully you can persuade a person and how skillfully the tech giants have used this “goodness” of persuasion in their technology and apps; It is certainly enviable and admirable, but this is the real story and this is the game. Take the example of Facebook, every time you refresh the app, “your” news feed, with your finger, something new comes up. This was also necessary so that the user does not get "bored" and think of moving somewhere else. The users are tied to these apps by resorting to positive reinforcement and we users are so used to this feedback (like, comment and share) that the lack of this feed depresses us and this feedback. An excess of our dopamine increases; It makes us feel good that we have done something good. Posting pictures of yourself over and over again in the same day, writing the same things over and over again, it's like an orbiter dancing his puppets on his fingers, but the puppets understand that they are moving at will. Everyone is doing something. Very artistic. Imagine that when you or I in our real life are sitting with friends or somewhere with family, our hand goes up to our device every now and then to check if something "new" has come! This is a design technique. Photo tagging is one such feature, as is mentioning. When you tag or mention someone, there is a 100% chance that they will definitely check it whether they react or not, but if you are tagging or mentioning a movie star or a very famous person. So they might not be able to check it due to too much engagement and too many tagging or mentions.
Cathy O'Neill is a data scientist, PhD, and author of the popular book Weapons of Math Destruction. According to Cathy, don't think of algorithms as just calculation-style formulas installed in a computer. These are the formulas for establishing opinion, forming opinion and changing opinion. Algorithms are not objective but they are guaranteed to achieve a certain level of success. All these formulas are made on commercial basis and keeping in mind the target of making profit and these formulas have the ability to increase their potential every time.