By Sophia Christensen
The eye-opening documentary, The Social Dilemma, has left society in complete and utter shock. Directed by Jeff Orlowski, the documentary explores the effect of smartphones and social networks on human behavior. He alerts society of social media: an effective, addictive drug. You would normally assume that the sole purpose of social sites such as Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook, etc. is to connect you to your friends and family, but that could not be further from the dark and frightening truth. As the documentary explains, technology remains highly manipulative, intrusive, and leaves society with various consequences.
Through our technological devices, our every move is monitored and tracked. Every like, share, comment, post, tag, text, etc. is being watched and never truly goes away with a tap of the delete button. Nowadays, devices contain deep and sacred personal information, or at least that’s what we think. See, information kept on your phone is not as personal as it may seem. One can say they know more about us than we know about ourselves.
We live in a consumerist society in which everywhere we look, there are advertisements popping out at us. The majority of the human population is not even consciously aware of it anymore since we have become so used to it. The Social Dilemma reveals that advertisements are actually the customers and that we are the product by virtue of social networks. Social networks throw in advertisements with every scroll of the thumb, trying to appeal to the users in order to profit and keep us buying. Social media programs our thoughts and makes us prone to this “drug” addiction, unknowingly, for their own benefit.
Now that you have a grasp on the reality of what seems to be harmless Snapchat, Instagram, and Tiktok, I highly encourage you to watch this documentary to gain an awareness of what is actually going on behind your screen. The screen holds so much power over every single individual, which begs the question, when did we give authority to social media to govern and control us?