Social Media: Simultaneous Utopia and Dystopia
Last night, I watched The Social Dilemma, a documentary about how “the technology that connects us also controls/manipulates/polarizes/distracts/monetizes us.” If I was scared about the future before watching this film, now I’m downright terrified. Even as someone who thinks about the downsides of social media all the time, The Social Dilemma made the reality even starker.
I tend to focus on the way that social media affects our mental health by distracting us, isolating us, and encouraging us to compare our lives to other people’s—or the perfectly photogenic version of their lives. But what struck me the most about The Social Dilemma was the ways in which social media is negatively impacting our democracy, mainly by spreading misinformation. Did you know that “fake news” travels six times faster than real news on Twitter? Scary to think about.
As I’ve written about in previous posts, including my interview with Lucy Gent Foma, social media polarizes us because it reinforces our beliefs by curating every article and post that we see. The algorithm isn’t designed to give us a well-rounded view of society, but rather to give us the dopamine hits that we seek so we continue to scroll (and therefore make them money by viewing ads).
“What if the content of Wikipedia entries changed depending on the person viewing the entry?” Jaron Lanier, author of Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now, asks. The fact that no two people see the same thing in their feed is what makes social media so dangerous; the algorithm knows so much about us that it can perfectly orchestrate our viewing so that we keep scrolling. Scrolling makes them money. Simple as that.
The Social Dilemma is based on interviews with former computer engineers and top employees from the biggest tech companies in the world. The image that stayed with me from the film is when one of the interviewees describes the way social media is very slightly “tilting the world”; in other words, the changes that social media is making to our psyches are so slight that they’re nearly imperceptible. Of course, we can choose to walk uphill, but who will choose the harder route? It’s much easier to go with the flow without questioning the way that social media is altering the very thoughts that we are having in our brains.
"Everyone's worries about our lives being controlled by AI," another interviewee scoffs. "It's not a thing of the future. They already are."
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