Digital technology has enabled the world some of the best and most useful tools that humankind has ever created. It seems like it improved all our lives. It helped us to be in contact with family and friends on the other side of the world. We can search for any topic at any time. We can now call a taxi or order food by making a couple of clicks on our phone. Digital technology has allowed us to live an efficient and more accessible life. However, this is only one side of the coin. It is vital to discuss the other side of the coin. The drawbacks and dangers of digitalization are immense, and it might shift our balance in society. Recently, a documentary called “the social dilemma” aired on Netflix and started a significant discussion about how social media affects our lives and society in an immensely difficult way. I want to take this time and write about some of the points discussed in that documentary. I urge everyone to watch “the social dilemma” to further educate yourself about the digital world we live in.
The central aspect of business and any company is trying to maximize profit. In this course, I learned that there are many strategies to obtain a high yield by utilizing data and the digital world. But I have not learned enough about the dangers of what this business concept does to our lives. Mainly social media, maybe the most important invention of the 21st century, drags our lives to a certain point to the mud. Many modern massive firms that are now the most valuable in the world live on the business concept of trying to get the user, in this case, us, to spend more time on our phones, computers, or other technological devices. They implemented recommendation systems for us to consume more. In the case of social media, you get videos recommended on YouTube or different posts on Instagram. But also, nonsocial media platforms and companies such as Amazon or Airbnb have the same business concept of recommendation systems. We were told that these recommendation systems are there to help us and make our lives better, and at the start, it defiantly fulfilled its purpose. However, now you go on Amazon, and Amazon creates novel needs for you. You get presented with advertisements all over the internet, and the algorithm exactly knows where we are vulnerable. The aim is to contact us to consume more, buy more products, watch more advertisements, and have more interaction on our electronic devices so that more data is collected to improve these recommendation systems further. Is this the world we want to live in? Have algorithms decided our needs so we can consume more, so more companies can grow while we slowly lose the touch of reality?
The adverse effects are especially visible through what social media created. A divided world. Fake news, polarization, or propaganda. We don’t know what and who to trust anymore. The 2020 elections in the United States is the perfect example. If you go on Twitter, it will be a matter of minutes until you see the first argument and insults between two opposite sides of the political spectrum. It feels like social media has forced society to choose one of the two political sides, left and right. Fake news from both sides has insanely emerged, and there have been studies that showed that fake news is shared six times more than accurate information. Everyone puts out statements and facts that fit their description of what they think, and the social media algorithm further supports that. We get recommended videos or posts that fit our profile, so we spend more time on the platforms so that massive corporations can profit from our data.
Especially GenZ, the generation born after 1996, has suffered from the downside of social media. At a young age, kids get introduced to the perfect image of beauty. Most of the time, influencers’ pictures are edited and revised to make the famous influencers more beautiful. On top of that, a lot of influencers nowadays get paid by companies to promote their products. However, most of the fans of these influencers are not fully grown adults who can make rational decisions, but kids that believe if they buy these products, they become like their idols. Consequently, it led young teenagers to question their appearance and urge their parents to purchase these products for them. When parents do not agree with those proposals, kids get disappointed or angry. It makes the entire environment in households worse. Suicide in the past years has increased immensely, primarily due to the introduction of social media. A generation is more depressed and struggles more to find self-love because they are introduced to all these ultimate standards that photoshop or other embellishment tools fake most of the time. We are losing ourselves. We forget what we are, humans. We can not be managed and controlled by an algorithm that tells us exactly what we want to see. We are not free anymore. We need to wake up.
My point with this post is for all of us to start thinking and changing these platforms to what they intended to be at the beginning, helping us. I am challenging you as a reader who will soon enter this high-tech industry to find solutions to fight the drawbacks of digitalization. I am challenging lecturers and teachers to stop only talking about profit and how to grow more, but rather speak more about digitalization problems. No gain will ever be worth the effort if we have a divided and completely depressed world. We are humans that must stand together and fight for each other. Let’s find ways to purely improving people’s lives, rather than using humans to make more profit. I am pleased if you could leave a comment and share your thoughts on this dilemma.
Bibliography
https://www.thesocialdilemma.com/
https://afsp.org/suicide-statistics/
https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/6-dangers-of-influencer-marketing/558493/
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2163226-fake-news-travels-six-times-faster-than-the-truth-on-twitter/
Hi Sahand!
Interesting opinion piece, I have also seen the documentary and its frightening to see the level of sophistication of these networks in order to keep us engaged and create our digital profiles. Indeed, we can see how social media is polarizing political perspectives not only in the US but also different regions in Europe.
It is interesting you bring up the need for introducing ethics and morality into the field. Both in our studies and social environments it seems like the overall focus still remains on popularity and profitability of these platforms, rather than studying the overall impact they make on society. Considering our own masters, there is no ethics in the digital environment class if you think about it. When thinking about governments questioning these large multinationals I cannot stop but think about the 2018 US congress hearing of Facebook where it seemed that the very ones questioning big tech C-level magnates, supposedly representing the people, did not have a single clue of how Facebook or even the internet works.
Besides a large change in how business is conducted I think that different governments are also missing knowledge and capabilities to hold these companies liable for their actions (representative of Orange County, Katie Porter even called the senate out for more than 50% of them still using flip phones!). Besides the changes in operations from within, I think it is also important we start to hold these companies accountable with knowledgeable