How The Social Dilemma Got Social Media Mostly Wrong
Social media may be bad for us, just not in the way most people think
Late last month I started getting emails from students in my media psychology classes. Had I seen The Social Dilemma, the new Netflix documentary on social media? And if so, what did I think?
I hadn’t seen it, having let my Netflix account lapse, but I gave them some general advice: documentaries chase their own version of clickbait audience engagement and generally are poor sources of information. Typically, they exaggerate the significance of a topic to score dramatic points. Few documentaries find success arguing that some factor or other is a tiny issue we shouldn’t worry about too much but might want to keep an eye on. That’s just not the documentary template.
But since Netflix swayed me to renew for October with The Haunting of Bly Manor, I figured this was as good a time as any to see The Social Dilemma. My impression: for all the attention it has gotten, it mostly gets things wrong, and is rather directionless on the one thing it gets right.
The Social Dilemma doesn’t shy away from melodrama. The documentary is slickly filmed and directed. But it slathers on the earnestness from the nervous score, to scary quotes from Sophocles and others, to the solemn…
