Not sure if this is Cafe Society or Great Debates, so let’s put this here.
We just watched this (IMHO) quite good, quite interesting and quite disturbing documentary on Netflix. It’s a mixture of talking heads (primarily Tristan Harris, formerly of Google but now with the Center for Humane Technology), who are all Silicon Valley techies who have seen the error of their ways…and a fictionalized dramatization of social media’s impact on one user and his family (and it anthropomorphizes the AI he interacts with, reminiscent of Inside/Out).
The takeaways:
Social media is simultaneously utopia/dystopia.
The social media business model is predicated on maximizing your screen time and clicks. They achieve this by feeding you what you want to see, not what you need.
The AI is completely amoral. It has no idea what’s true, only what will make you keep watching and clicking.
The result is the hyper-polarization of our society.
I found it thought-provoking and rather horrifying.
I haven’t seen it yet but my wife did and thought the dramatizations were a bit out of place. Otherwise, she thought it was good and quite revealing that some of the key players in creating social media are also very vocal against exposing their kids to it at an early age.
If they provide a solution, and that solution is for people to stop using social media (or at least stop living by it) then I agree with it. If they have a different suggested solution then it needs the most critical scrutiny.
All media, even not-for-profit business models like NPR, give the audience what they want rather than what they need, because without viewers/readers, they have no reason for existence. When you start talking about giving people what they need, then we are back at wondering who decides what people need?
It ended with some recommendations, such as: limit screen time. No social media below a certain age. Turn off your notifications. Never click on a recommended video.
All journalism involves editorial content decisions, because a news source can’t show you all the news. But what’s going on isn’t really journalism. It’s: you clicked on a flat-earther conspiracy theory video…here’s something else you may like along the same lines. That’s just building bubbles.