The Social Dilemma should be required viewing
When my alarm goes off in the morning, I snooze a bit, push my boyfriend towards the shower, and read some news in bed myself. It goes something like this: open the NOS app and read, open the Volkskrant app and go through it, and already take a small shot of Insta. My second round of Insta is usually in the bathroom, I could romanticize it but I'll just say it as it is. So twice, and then I haven't even had coffee or yogurt with granola yet...
Our Wieke tipped The Social Dilemma. I was on a (social media-free) vacation, so the dilemma had to wait, but when I got home I turned on Netflix. Heavyweights of social media appear in the documentary with actually just one warning: be careful with the so-called social apps and media. Among the speakers is even the creator of Facebook's thumbs up and the man who invented the business model for Zuckerberg. After ten minutes of watching, I wondered what my eventual screen time at a possible pearly gate would be. That you knock there at the end of your life and they print out a little statistic of your social media. “Look, this is how much time you wasted staring at a screen and swiping, while you were on that darn beautiful earth.” Crap.
My work is usually my excuse when my screen time comes up. But the scenario they sketch in the documentary is quite accurate. I refresh and refresh and refresh to see if anything (probably totally uninteresting) is going to be served up by the algorithm that is written on my usage behavior. Another moment where I had to swallow: the fact that people are only called users when it comes to drugs and social media. It makes you/me think.
Can I not be so social for the first hour that I'm awake? It even seems that you are more productive throughout the day if you don't start scrolling right away, I read (probably this morning before my breakfast) at Workjuice. You are so well-rested that you should spend that time on your priorities for that day.
Maybe we can make The Social Dilemma mandatory in schools. If the giants don't want to warn and protect you from the effects, then maybe we should create a disclaimer ourselves. I still can't do without it, but it can surely be a little less.
Image: Netflix
