The Dark Truth of Internet Technology Pictured in “The Social Dilemma” Movie

 

    The Social Dilemma movie is a hybrid movie that combines a documentary with a little side drama that complements the example of the documentary that is being discussed. This movie contains an interview by many people from the technology industry, mainly focused on Tristan Harris, a former Google Design Ethicist. The main focus of this movie is the rise of danger that can be caused by internet technology. This article contains big spoiler alerts about the movie itself, you can watch the movie first if you may. If you don't mind the spoiler then its settled. Take a seat and have a look at how this movie shows the dark truth about our society nowadays in the vastness of technology, especially the Internet.

    The fast growth of technology is undeniable and cannot be avoided in today's life. One of those technologies is the Internet, the internet is a broad network that connects people around the world. Of course the existence of the internet made our lives easier. It also can help us connect people around the world just by one click. As said by Tristan Harris ``They've reunited lost family members. They’ve found organ donors. I mean, there were meaningful, systemic changes happening around the world because of these platforms that were positive! I think we were naive about the flip side of that coin.” Tristan said that we are naive about the flip side of the coin, meaning that despite those advantages of the Internet there was also the danger of the Internet that could harm us. The fact that people behind the industry warn us about the danger of the technology that they created is devastating.

    Companies like Google and Facebook are some of the wealthiest and most successful of all time. How did they get the money from? Well the answer is even when we don’t pay for the products that we use, advertisers pay for the products that we use. Advertisers are the customers. We’re the thing being sold. As Tristan said “If you’re not paying for the product, then you are the product.” A lot of people think that Google is just a search bar, Facebook or Twitter just a place to see what our friends are doing and see their photos. The truth is Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, companies like this, their business model is to keep people engaged on the screen. The more people engaged to the screen the more they see the ads and the more profit they get from that.

    How does it work? It's simple, everything we’re doing online is being watched, is being tracked, is being measured. Every single action we take is carefully monitored and recorded. They build models that predict our actions. They predict what kind of videos will keep you watching and predict what kinds of emotions tend to trigger you. At a lot of technology companies, there’s three main goals. There’s the engagement goal: to drive up your usage, to keep you scrolling. There’s the growth goal: to keep you coming back and inviting as many friends and getting them to invite more friends. And then there’s the advertising goal: to make sure that, as all that’s happening, they’re making as much money as possible from advertising.

    From this sense the technology that has been made is creating a persuasive to get people engaged even more. For example when you pull down and you refresh, it’s gonna be a new thing at the top. Pull down and refresh again, it’s new. Every single time. Which, in psychology, we call a positive intermittent reinforcement. We also tend to be curious about the notifications that might popped up every time and we unconsciously taken the phone open up and engaged even more. This could lead to the attachment of person to the technology, it also could lead to addiction. Social media is a drug. We have a basic biological imperative to connect with other people. That directly affects the release of dopamine in the reward pathway. Millions of years of evolution are behind that system to get us to come together and live in communities, to find mates, to propagate our species. So, there’s no doubt that a vehicle like social media, which optimizes this connection between people, is going to have the potential for addiction.

    Technology was designed to make algorithms that were really good at recommending the next video to you or really good at getting you to take a photo with a filter on it. It’s not just that it’s controlling where they spend their attention. Social media starts to dig deeper and deeper down into the brain stem and take over kids’ sense of self-worth and identity. The industry created the features such as likes or comments to get people to feel the positive response based on what they’re posting. However, it became a toxic thing that people started to be insecure about how they look on social media. This led people to question their value as humans. Oftentimes people receive good comments about their post but there is no guarantee that there will be no negative comments. These problems lead people to be more anxious about other people's perception towards themselves. This entire problem causes people nowadays to suffer from anxiety and depression way easier than it used to be. The number of teenager that has doing self harm or even suicide is increasing fast in the growth of these technology.

    The AI that works in these technologies also becomes a prime problem. Of course this AI would help you easier to find something you need on the internet. It can give you many options about what you need. It also could give you a recommendation for you just by searching something you wanted to search. However this AI has a lack, they don’t know what the truth is. This AI works to make everything suitable to what you look for, not the thing that really is the truth. We can see this happens all the time by seeing some fake news. The hoax that spread on the internet is easily spread to the people because they are curious about it and the AI knows about this. It will give you the fake news for you to read, oftentimes you believed it. For example, COVID-19, in the first wave of COVID-19 you can see a lot of fake news spread throughout the entire world. We don't know which news is the truth, because of that AI that recommends you to read to watch what is trending that you may find interesting. The problem is that this is hard to be avoided, and it affects how society sees this problem that becomes bigger and creates chaos.

    There is a lot of insight and view of the technology industry in this movie. I recommend you to watch this movie to raise awareness and also to get a better understanding towards this problems. However, the key to solve all of this problem is starts from ourselves. Try digital minimization, because obviously in today's era we can’t separate our daily life from this technology. For school, college, even for work. However we must know the limit of the use of the internet or social media. Therefore we could minimize the screen time of how long we use this technology. The key is to use smartly towards this technology, don't make the technology outsmart you.