Review of the Movie “The Social Dilemma”

Here’s an interesting tidbit:

the guy who invented the “endless scroll” feature on social media (you know, the ability to endlessly move down through content without clicking) regrets it. The designer’s name is Aza Raskin, and he said ”the innovation kept users looking at their phones far longer than necessary. (He) had not set out to addict people and now felt guilty about it.”

Pretty fascinating, huh?

He’s not the only one. Chamath Palihapitiya, a former senior executive at Facebook, is outspoken in his concern about the downsides of social media. In this YouTube video he says, “You don’t realize it, but you are being programmed,” and, “I’m proactively trying to rewire my brain chemistry to not be short-term focused.” And there are others.

I’ve been following guys like this for a while since this is my topic, and I’ve read widely about the ways our cell technologies are affecting us - especially our souls. Heck, I’m even writing my own book about it! So I’m grateful for the growing awareness and widening dialogue about the dangers of phone overuse.

The new movie out on Netflix, The Social Dilemma, is a great resource in this arena. It’s a “pull back the curtain” style documentary, and dozens of phone engineers and Silicon Valley execs (or ex-execs, as most are out of the game now) are interviewed. Aza Raskin, the endless scroll inventor, is one.

Here are a few of the points the film makes:

-Engineers use behavioral design principles that draw heavily on human psychology to make the apps addictive.

-The artificial intelligence software the apps rely on use complex algorithmic recommendation engines to predict our preferences, and these continually “improve themselves.” So the level of addictiveness increases naturally over time.

-The reason social media is free is because advertisers fund it, “buying” our attention from the social media companies. Our attentions are for sale. And it’s free because we are the products, not the consumers.

-The ads you see are geared toward each user’s innate interests and behaviors, so social media continues to show us only things that interest us. So if you’re conservative and you click on news articles from Republican-based news outlets, your feed will come to only show you those types of articles. You literally will not see the articles your Democratic colleague sitting next to you on the bench is seeing. Ever. So our reliance on social media, and the fact that it’s where most get their news, is causing us to become more polarized in our thinking than we would otherwise be.

This last point interested (and distressed) me most, because I hadn’t realized the extent to which it’s true.

The film’s a helpful resource for all of us - dwellers in the modern world, and frequent users of our phones. It makes complex concepts digestible to viewers of all ages, cutting to vignettes showing a “real” family as they interact with their phones. Scenes from this fictional family’s life illustrate the points that the interviewees are making, and it drives home the points (even if the creepy music gets a little old at times.) It’s a good movie for parents to watch with their tweens and teens; I plan to re-watch it with mine.

The movie does have shortcomings, of course. It attributes ills to social media which are also originating in other places. It conflates the techology that precipitates negative behaviors in its users with capitalism and its ability to allow large corporations to grow larger. These are separate issues that deserve (and didn’t receive) their own space. It offers some hope at the end, but not too many practical recommendations for diminishing social media usage. And of course the film omits the role of faith, as Annie F. Downs pointed out in her IG stories this week, and might leave a believing viewer forgetful of the fact that God is able to redeem and use for good all tools, regardless of their design intentions.

Nevertheless, it’s very useful watching.

Take a gander and leave a note in the comments to let me know what you think!

Is social media a dilemma for you?

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