My takeaways from ‘The Social Dilemma’

I am a 20 year old student who is pursuing engineering in electronics and telecommunication. This is my first ever blog. Recently, I watched a Netflix original documentary ‘The Social Dilemma’. After watching this documentary I became aware about myself, the internet and the techies who run these social media sites. So I will be sharing my thoughts, my takeaways and some facts after watching this documentary.

1. AVOID GIVING INFO ABOUT YOURSELF TO THE INTERNET AS MUCH AS YOU CAN! : By this statement I don’t mean to depict that the internet will expose/leak your info anywhere. Everything you do on the internet is under observation, your google search engine, your texts, the posts/images/links that you share to your friends and every other thing. These activities tells the internet/social media about your interests. Further, the techies behind the internet world have created an algorithm where it collects your ‘interests’ and will only display things on your feed which you are probably interested in. This is a strategy to keep your eyes glued to your mobile screens.
2. If you are not buying the product , YOU are the product. Almost all the social media platforms these days are free. They let you sign up in their platforms without taking a single penny from you. But again , there is a strategy behind this. More the people download and sign in into these platforms, the more they earn. More the people spend their time on these platforms, the more they run ads on your screen and running these ads on your screens will earn them money.
3. The algorithms are designed based on what we view. In fact, on Google different users will get different results for the same search terms based on algorithms that are created to anticipate your queries.
4. GROWTH HACKING : We have unknowingly become the human lab rats of the people controlling the internet. Growth hacking means strategies aimed to achieve massive growth by manipulating the user. In this they are conducting experiments on people like us who are unaware about such things.
5. Social media is as good as drugs. Using social media too much is extremely dangerous in terms of both your mental and physical health. You might be having fun while spending time on those platforms but it actually affects in many ways.
6. Spending too much time on social media creates anxiety within ourselves. Research(from a trusted source showed in the documentary) shows that the suicide rate of girls of the age group 12–16 has increased by 89% in the past 10 years. While, the suicide rate of girls of the age group 18–22 has increased by 159%! People tend to harm themselves when they use too much of these platforms.
7. There are a few techies in this world who really want to make these platforms less addictive for us and especially the teenagers. They tried to plot ideas for this to their companies. But these ideas were ignored and these techies were eventually thrown out of their companies/industries. this tells us a lot about the intentions of the people who are running the internet.

Above all, The answer to the question ‘ Technology: Boon or Bane?’ depends on the way we use it. It depends on how efficiently we use it. I will highly recommend people to watch this documentary, especially to the age group 13–22. It will make you more aware about the internet world and what are the behind the scenes in it and you might also realize some things about yourself. Now, the question arises, “But how do we control ourselves and stop our addiction?”. I will do my research and write about this in my next blog.