Member-only story
Four Surprising Keys to Resolving “The Social Dilemma”
How to consume social media without being consumed by it
*Spoiler alert*: This article contains mild spoilers about the new Netflix documentary “The Social Dilemma”.
My wife and I sat down to watch the new Netflix documentary “The Social Dilemma” last night. The dilemma at the heart of the movie is simple. On the one hand, the internet is undoubtedly moving us toward an almost utopian society where everything we want and need is just one click away, On the other, the deliberate manipulation of our psyches to maximize profits is rife for dystopian abuse from both power-hungry politicians and corporations who “just” want to get as much of our money as possible.
Our own comic attempts to not check our own phones as they dinged with alerts and notifications provided a perfect soundtrack to the movie’s explanations of how we (and the 3.6 billion other regular users of social media) were deliberately being manipulated into spending as much time as possible engaging with our screens.
While the movie did a fairly good job of explaining both the deliberately addictive nature of…
