THE SOCIAL DILEMMA ANALYSIS

     I was able to watch a social media documentary called The Social Dilemma. This is a documentary on Netflix that came out in 2020 and discusses the creation, progression and negative evolution of social media platforms from both a business and user perspective. This documentary tells a great story through the eyes of former social media platform employees, social media users, and other industry experts. They cover a variety of topics and important events that social media has played a large role in such as the Covid 19 pandemic and recent presidential elections.   

    This documentary does a great job of truly exposing social media platforms and their true intentions and how these intentions have affected people of all ages negatively but especially generation z. This is due to a couple of factors, mainly because our generation has grown up with social media for the vast majority of our lives so the impacts are far greater especially because our brains are not fully developed. With the constant stimulation social media has provided us, our generation has become addicted and reliant on social media in an every day atmosphere.  

    One of the most interesting sections of the documentary was the deep dive into the business side of social media companies and how their intentions have evolved. The interviewees discuss how the user is the product and the companies do everything in their power to keep the user on their app for as long as possible through notifications, sounds and specific content algorithms to keep the user interested and constantly scrolling. This was the most eye opening part of the documentary and allowed me to look at the impacts of social media with a different lens.