Social Shock

Like a bad PSA where the relatively unknown, in-crowd of the tech industry take turns revealing insider secrets, “The Social Dilemma (TSD),” is an eloquently packaged warning for the new age. Early, 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 little more than a guise to facilitate monitored interactions with a centralized 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 in light of the 2016 U.S. presidential election, whereby it was discovered that social media networks, particularly Facebook, were used as a mechanism for misinformation and manipulation, TSD instead opts to capitalize on the moment by dramatizing the exploitation of users of social media.

The most glaring thing 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, as if this affords them plausible deniability.

Hard nope. I cannot bring myself to trust the people that brought us here to the ethical brink, to bring us back safely; lest we forget many of the contemporary issues regarding bias, misinformation, radicalism, and desensitization stem from the proliferation of social media. In reality social media was but one outcome of the information revolution, not the revolution itself. As novel information and communication technologies (ICTs) emerge there will continue to be rapid shifts in ethics and societal norms. Floridi alluded to this in “Ethics after the Information Revolution,” in an analogy meant to illustrate humanity’s technological growth is far outpacing it’s cultural and ethical growth.

So, I contend what humanity is experiencing now is, ‘social shock,’ and a direct result of this unchecked technological growth. Like Floridi before me, I coin things, thus ‘social shock’ is:

the collective feeling experienced by society, as the infosphere becomes more fully realized and partitioned due to the proliferation of ICTs, whereby the intense and novel problem of interacting in situations outside the comfort zones of our personal filter bubble becomes more complicated, exasperating both the societal polarization and digital divide.