Social Media All Along!
Like a bad PSA where the relatively unknown, in-crowd of the tech industry reveal insider secrets from the Valley, the “Social Dilemma (TSD),” is an eloquently packaged warning for the new age. Early on, it’s made known that few of them actually use social media themselves, going as far as not allowing their children to use it at all. Unsurprisingly, it turns out that the “connectivity” we’ve experienced for over a decade was simply a guise to facilitate monitored interactions with a data harvesting system. While the documentary seems sincere enough on its face in seeking to generate awareness about the predatory designs of the social media business model, it falls short.
Unlike the other Netflix documentary, “The Great Hack,” which brought further scrutiny to the Cambridge Analytica scandal after the 2016 U.S. presidential election, where social media networks like Facebook were used as mechanisms for misinformation and political manipulation, TSD instead opts to capitalize on the moment by dramatizing the exploitation of social media users.
What’s glaring about these admissions, is that they are coming from the architects themselves, people like ‘Tristan Harris’ who worked so hard to embed social media into the cultural fabric, and whose efforts to raise the alarm, now, land as an instance of “too little too late.” The message is clear, the motivations are not, and they come across as a group not wanting to face accountability for their role in the creation of the problem.
Therefore, I cannot trust those that brought us to the ethical brink, to return us safely; lest we forget many of the contemporary issues regarding bias, misinformation, radicalism, and desensitization stem from social media’s proliferation. In reality social media was but one outcome of the information revolution, not the revolution itself. As more novel information and communication technologies (ICTs) emerge, there will continue to be rapid shifts in ethics and societal norms. Floridi alludes to this in ‘Ethics after the Information Revolution,’ when using the analogy of a tree to highlight how humanity’s technological growth has far outpaced its cultural and ethical. So what comes next?
Too much time is spent forecasting our trajectory, without looking at what’s going on around us. The sad truth is that we are more divided, losing control, and less connected.
Fingers pointing Left and Right, black and white, disinformation and misinformation, but the culprit behind all the chaos is really social media.
There’s no quick fix here, but a good faith effort might look like a functional shift of these platforms from entertainment to utility, whereby the power of these networks could be leveraged to address real issues such as inequity and inequality, guess there aren’t enough likes for that.
