Summary of the video on The Social Dilemma

Watch the video and do a short summary (for the third classes studying the topic of social media- good points and bad points)

The Social Dilemma

Summary of the video

You can get easily addicted to your phone, social media tries to predict what you would like to see, making you keep using your phone and because of muscle memory you automatically check your phone and your apps.

The guy in the video who worked in the gmail team, thinks that this is manipulative and wants everyone to understand this with the film “social dilemma” .

The term social dilemma indicates the inevitable use of social media that doesn’t align with the public or social good.

The Social Dilemma

Summary of the video

When we’re using social media, we’re the product. Nothing is for free and when they say that social networks are free services, it’s just an illusion because big companies earn money by selling your data and thanks to advertisements. Social media’s addiction is related to companies’ earnings and that’s why they have to increase the time people spend on social media. To do it they try to influence people’s minds so that people want to spend time on their services. The sad thing is that even if you know all these things you’re not aware of it, you’ll continue to use social networks, maybe thinking that you’re free, you’re not influenced by anything but remember: that’s what they want you to think!

'The Social Dilemma's' Tristan Harris on How to Make Social Media Less Addictive

This video is an episode part of a famous talk-show broadcast in the USA, “

The Ellen DeGeneres Show”, in which the presenter has a conversation with Tristan Harris,

a former Google employee and a member of Gmail crew.

In this conversation Tristan, answering Ellen’s questions, talks about how he went from

being a Silicon Valley insider to become president of the Center for Humane Technology and,

overall, about a phenomenon described in his documentary “The Social Dilemma”,

from which it takes its name.

To get a start, this phenomenon is based on a commercial mechanism in which there are

two members:

1. The service offerers, namely agencies or companies;

2. The customers, namely the users of social media.

When an agency or a company posts a content on various platforms of social media,

users interested in it are a source of earning because their likes, sharings and views about

that content put together a social currency and so just think about this: the more is the

amount of social currency, the more is the amount of money the service offerer earns.

To continue, numerous are the factors that work so as to make that phenomenon to be real:

1)Lacking of some knowledge in the individual, in fact these agencies or companies

have more choices and earn more and more because the user is in this situation;

2)Studies on today’s society, in fact they are able to know what people like or dislike

starting from these;

3)Use of social media by children and teenagers, in fact this is a sort of bank because

they are the most devoted users on social media.

According to Tristan Harris, what’s more, social media is addictive, but we can’t do anything

because we are forced to live in it by society. So, as we get to know the problem, the only

way to destroy that commercial mechanism described before is:

tell the truth about manipulation and the manipulative power of social media

KEYWORDS and KEY EXPRESSIONS

1) We're forced to use this system (That's the social dilemma)

2) Addiction

3) Inconvenient truth about tech industry

4)They make money from our attention

4)Randomness makes you so addictive

5) Outrage, narcisism, polarization,addiction, disinformation

6)If we're distracted we can be easily and strongly influenced

7)You see what it knows you want to see

8)They predict the perfect thing to make us stay longer

9) You feel excluded if you don't participate

10) Show children how it may be manipulative_no one wants to feel manipulated