Have you seen The Social Dilemma on Netflix? I watched it this week and was blown away by the additional context it gave to my existing thoughts and concerns about social media. If you haven’t seen it yet, I highly recommend it. You can also read this well-written post that summarizes the main points and offers up an interesting perspective on where the film falls short. I’ll try not to give a synopsis on the film and, rather, focus on my own social dilemma which was further ignited after watching it.
One specific comment from the documentary struck a cord with me that I have continued to unravel over the last few days. In the film, Tristan Harris, co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology and former design ethicist at Google, raises the issue of whether social media should be considered a tool. He argues that it should not.
Unlike a bicycle, he says, social media is not a simple tool waiting passively for you to pick it up, it’s actually a highly manipulative system. If you think of a traditional tool, like a bicycle, the tool is a product. But with social media, we are the product in a business model that rewards our own exploitation. Push notifications and other features are designed to pull us into the apps and keep us there for advertisers by playing to the biological processes that cause addiction.
My first instinct after watching the documentary was to delete all the apps from my phone. That feeling is not new. This isn’t the first time that I saw something or read something about social media that wanted me to “quit” cold turkey. We’ve all known, for a while now, that social media can have devastating impacts on our health and wellbeing. I often feel bad about myself for the simple act of opening Instagram or Facebook, let alone the everything that comes after that — the mindless scrolling, the painful comparison to others, the endless “inspiration” which doesn’t actually inspire me to create anything of my own, etc.
Still, there are unavoidable benefits of social media that make it hard for me to cut it out of my life. For example, it is one of the easiest ways for me to stay connected with friends and family. I don’t just mean following their posts to see what they’ve been up to, but actually communicating and staying in touch with them.
Three years ago I moved to Israel. Unlike when I moved to Boston for university, having to face international communication with my friends and family from the States is a real challenge now. It’s no longer a matter of simply picking up the phone or shooting a quick text message. Now, in order to communicate, it’s about finding common media. Email works pretty well for mom and dad, WhatsApp is good for friends that frequently travel or have lived abroad (in Israel, WhatsApp is essentially the default texting app and uses cell data and Wifi), but what about everyone else?
Here, then, is my own social dilemma. How do I find the balance between 1) staying connected with friends and family even when they live thousands of miles away, and 2) not being used and manipulated by the tools I use to do so.
To say that my dilemma is all about social media would be too narrow. It’s more a question of how I want to live my life and how I want to be connected to my people. Social media is a platform. It is a platform that I can use out-of-the-box for social interaction with anybody else that uses it.
From my time working in hi-tech, I know that there are trade-offs when choosing any tool. You may pay more for a specific tool because you want a specific feature that they offer, or you choose a free tool because you think it’s good enough to match your expectations. The Social Dilemma lays out a pretty gruesome picture of the biggest trade-offs of social media. Our social interactions are being manipulated by these companies for their monetary gains. So I’m asking myself, am I really okay with the details of that arrangement? And also, what other option do I have?
Of course, there is always the option of building the tool yourself. In that case, the trade-off may be time and/or money. It’s work — but it’s also perfectly catered to your expectations. No, I’m not about to embark on some great venture to reimagine social media or something like that.
I was thinking about all of this in relation to my website. My website is a platform that I can use to create my own space to share my passions and connect with people. That’s more or less what I use Instagram for — Because I want to connect. I want people to know who I am, to understand me. That’s the same reason why I started to write this blog too, more or less (read my origin story here).
I suppose, then, resolving my personal social dilemma is really a matter of building up this platform and using it to express myself and to connect with others. I just recently created the email subscription form you see on the right side of your screen so if you’re interested in following along with me, go ahead and sign up 🙂
This isn’t a perfect replacement for social media obviously, it’s still pretty one-sided, and it’s not very personal. But, Rome wasn’t built in a day. We’ll see what kind of happy-medium I’m able to find. Meanwhile, I’ll be sitting down to write some old fashioned snail mail.