The Dark Truth Of Facebook Notification -The Social Dilemma (Netflix)
Rating: 4/5
Almost three fourth of the world population wakes up to Instagram and Facebook notifications. But did you know there’s so much behind these notifications? We don’t even realize how we gave social media the power to control our lives and thoughts – what we see, what we read, what we believe, everything.
We are so unaware of the manipulation that social media plunges us into. Netflix documentary film The Social Dilemma sheds light on this manipulation.
The hard-hitting docudrama exposes how every social media is improving its design to pull us in front of our screen and grab our attention. It is this attention of ours that is being sold and monetized.
We are becoming slaves!
We today spend more time staring at our phone screens and listening to notification chimes than we look and listen to each other. But it is not just this deep-rooted addiction that counts as the negative side-effect of social media. The worst is how we try so hard to attain unachievable beauty standards and rate our worth based on the number of likes and comments.
Social media not just threatens our self-esteem but feeds us with false information pushing us into darkness and stupidity. The alarming number of suicide rates and other records are a testament to this.
The spreading of fake news through social media is not a new concept. May it be related to the coronavirus or some news regarding a prominent celebrity, fake news has always created a lot of confusion among the public. We trust these platforms so much that we don’t even take a moment to do some fact check.
The Social Dilemma presents a bunch of Silicon Valley employees who share their experience in working and developing social media algorithms to mold our thought-processing in a way that will benefit the giant corporates. They explain in detail, breaking down every step in the design that leads us to become something that we are not. Social media has become the truth. We are so engrossed in it that we are now delusional and finding it difficult to differentiate between what is true and what is a lie.
The employees share how addicted they themselves were to their phones, and how every notification compelled them to check their phone every now and then.
The Real Truth
A humanized visual sequence is incorporated in the documentary to give a glimpse of the real impact every social media has ever had on us. It’s like watching a horror movie. We, the consumers are the zombies.
This 1 hour 33 minutes documentary is an eye-opener. The world on our screens is so deceptive but wasn’t intended to be one. The film concludes by briefing upon how we can break the shackles and take over the control for ourselves. The different social media that exist today were never created to be what they are today and with proper usage of technology, the opportunities that social media opens up are infinite. So, in the end, it is solely up to us to use these platforms wisely.
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