The Flip Side

In today’s world, the amount of control some of the greatest minds in tech and a few fastest supercomputers have over what we think, how we act, basically how we live our lives is beyond our imagination. The tech that connects us also divides and controls us and, in a way, manipulates us. I recently watched a documentary named “The Social Dilemma”, which is available on Netflix and yea telegram, torrents, or whatever. Some of you may have watched it and if not, long story short, it is basically about how social media works and how much it impacts us ‘A’ as an individual, ‘B’ collectively as the society, which honestly way more than what we think. And I wanted to share some of my thoughts and here it goes......

Well, all these things like Facebook, Twitter etc. etc., they all have many many advantages, like these things saved many lives and I’m not even exaggerating, but everything has a flip side, and the same goes in this case also. So, let's look at that flip side and basically, that’s the entire fuss about “The Social Dilemma”. For starters, social media is no more just a tool, a tool is something that waits in a corner to be used by us, but social media, nah-hah, no more waiting games, it seduces you to use and it doesn’t stop there, it also in a way manipulate the way you use it. Whether we accept it or not, social media today is manipulative, persuasive, and yes, addictive.

    "There are only two industries that call their customers 'users':        illegal drugs and software."

    But it is not completely our fault to be addicted to these things, they want it that way and actually, they make it that way. They trap you; they want you to be using their apps more and more. And, what is shocking is that they do some nasty kinds of stuff to achieve this. But for what?? What does Mark Zuckerberg get if I surf through Facebook for 30 minutes, well, simple, money or profit or revenue whatever term you wanna call it. Okay wait, but we don’t pay anything to use these services like Facebook or Insta or Twitter right, so how does it work? “If you're not paying for the product, then you are the product.” The amount of time you spend on these platforms is directly proportional to the amount of data they can collect about you, and by data, I don’t mean your pet’s name or your address, they collect stuff like what are your interests, what you don’t like, what is your passion, how long you look at a product before deciding to buy it, and many many more. With the help of all these data, they build a model of you, and this model will be surprisingly very accurate. They can predict your actions, and they are using those predictions to manipulate us to some extent and the worst thing is we don’t even know we are being manipulated.       

    Okay that is one and what else are the downsides of this medium, again it has become so easy to manipulate someone with this exponential growth in social media and technology and that is because we are falling behind as humans to evolve along with the technology. We are being careless and irresponsible, and as a result, there are a lot of conspiracy theories and false information out there, and all this false information has its own consequence and these consequences are often disappointing and unfortunate. It is so easy to manipulate someone on the internet that millions of people believe that our Earth is flat and things like the Corona virus, Global Warming are just hoaxes. So, at this rate, with increasing evolution in social media, in the future, we may live in a society where no one believes anything that is true and that thought is horrifying. 

    What is more frightening for me, especially after watching “The Social Dilemma” is the fact that the minds that created these platforms and the people who actually worked with Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and such are scared to death and worried about the way things are evolving. So, what do we do and how to escape this trap? There are some things to keep in mind, the first thing is to start being careful and responsible, when you post something it is out there in a network which connects the entire population of this planet, so be responsible. Fact-check before sharing anything. And then, this is one thing I’ve been doing always, turn off all your notifications, all the platforms are so good at tempting you, so don’t fall for it, turn off the notifications and monitor how long you’ve been using them. Do not fall for recommendations, because they don’t recommend you things you wanna see, they recommend things that they ‘want’ you to see. 

    There is a lot of things I want to share regarding this, but at the same time I don’t wanna spoil the thing for you, so if you’ve got some time, do watch “The Social Dilemma”, it is really good and for sure will change the way you think about these things. Anyways, thank you for reading, DIGITALLY YOURS.......