My Social Dilemma (Part One): I Get Paid For This Stuff
Megan had already gone to bed and I was staying up way past my bedtime, watching The Social Dilemma. I thought to myself “this is bad.” Not that the documentary was bad. It was what the documentary highlighted. What troubled me were the parts that exposed why we’re addicted to our phones and the potential ramifications if we don’t try and reel this in.
My TV screen shifted back to the Netflix main menu after the film’s credits and my immediate reaction was to…post about the film on Facebook.
“What net good has social media provided the world?” It was my honest thought in that moment. I had never envied the Amish more in my life than in the hour after watching that film.
I thought about all this as I was watching the Netflix subscription on the TV in the house I owned….all paid for with an income from a career founded in social media. The irony was not lost on me.
How does someone reconcile the uncomfortable truths about social and tech addiction with a career (and most importantly, your family’s livelihood) that leveraged those very tools? Did I shoulder some responsibility? If I do, why do I simultaneously feel like a victim to these tools?
“If something is a tool, it genuinely is just sitting there, waiting patiently. If something is not a tool it’s demanding things from you. It’s seducing you, it’s manipulating you, it wants things from you. We’ve moved away from a tools based technology environment, to an addiction and manipulation used technology environment. Social media isn’t a tool waiting to be used. It has its own goals, and it has its own means of pursuing them by using your psychology against you.”
I had a lot of competing thoughts swirling in my head for quite some time. To fight the impulse I feel like we see too much online, I refrained from immediately adding my commentary. We don’t have to publicly post a reaction to everything in the world, as much as we feel compelled to. Holding back and thinking about all of this was one small way for me to regain some control back from social technology.
There’s a lot to think about
When I finally started writing out all my thoughts, I realized I had way too many for one post. It would have been a very long read. Too long. My career in social media has taught me that content is better received in smaller chunks. So I’m taking that approach in sharing my thinking around both the documentary and how we got to where we are today.
My next few posts are going to drill down into individual areas I want to talk more in-detail about. I don’t want to just gloss over everything, give a blanket “all technology is bad” statement and do nothing more than virtue signal to my followers the potential perils of tech addiction.
The next posts will cover my personal history and thinking around:
The early days of social and how it always wasn’t this way
The unintended consequences of algorithms and engagement
Is social media really a tool?
How much responsibility should social marketers bear for our issues?
Where do I go from here?
My intention is just to share my perspective on it all. Share some of the big highlights from what came from the documentary and my general observations from being a student of the social media space for the last ten years. I do not try to jump into things like the future of publishing, the spread of misinformation or tech’s impact on the current election cycle.
If you don’t want to read it all, here’s my TL;DR conclusions:
Social still has the power to be a catalyst for good…if it undergoes major reforms
We all need to have the humility to realize none of us are immune to addiction
Don’t use social media as your primary news source
Don’t be afraid to be bored
How did I come to these conclusions? You’ll have to keep reading.
If you just read this and have no idea what I’m talking about, here’s a trailer to the documentary.