Social media companies such as Facebook, Instagram, Tik Tok, and others have taken over the world. These multi-billion dollar companies have found ways to appeal to users, create relationships, reconnect lost friends and family, and, more than anything else, tell us how to think and act. The Social Dilemma collects a series of information from experts in the field of technology (as well as creates a fictional world to depict the issues social media is causing).
The purpose of the fictional aspect of the film, the one surrounding Ben (Skyler Gisondo) and his family, is meant to create an emotional connection to a series of characters, ensuring that viewers can appreciate, more directly, how social media affects us. The issue with the fictional story is that the acting is so farfetched and unrealistic that the bonds writers had hope for are hindered. This fictional story that runs parallel to The Social Dilemma documentary ultimately makes the relationship between viewers and the film strained at times and comes dangerously close to losing the interest of those viewers. The decision to include this parallel, fictional story was a terrible one, as it ultimately does more harm than good in the grand scheme of the film.
What keeps viewers involved in the film and stops them from being completely turned off by the subpar acting, the entirely too fast-paced manner of the story, and just about every other aspect of the story of Ben is the expertise present and the level of knowledge provided by people high up in the social media industry. The crew involved in bringing The Social Dilemma to life does a wonderful job of delegating and allowing the experts to speak their minds, no matter what form that takes. As viewers are provided information from a number of different resources (all of which feel legitimate and trustworthy) they are given the ability to discern for themselves how they truly feel about the apps that run their lives (or if they believe that these apps actually run their lives).
Everything that The Social Dilemma tells us is incredibly scary. It’s scary to come to the realization that humans thousands of miles away and super computers are manipulating our way of thinking, our expectations of the world, and what we have access to, but the reality is that the internet--and to some degree social media--is important to our way of living. The Social Dilemma, through its use of experts, is able to express the imminent threat present to our humanity and the world in which we live. The film does, from time to time, make light of the terrifying nature of what is transpiring on social media. While it seems difficult to appreciate making light of a situation that Tim Kendall (former president of Pinterest) believes will ultimately lead to civil war, that lighthearted approach allows some viewers the ability to refrain from going off the deep end; it allows them to continue looking at the bigger picture and weigh their options rather than assume that only the worst is inevitable.
The information provided in The Social Dilemma is informative and eye opening, honest and frightening. From the outside looking in, the information provided to the audience can only be speculated, but hearing from the experts confirms a lot of things that social media users have thought for years. With the exception of the fictional aspect of the film, The Social Dilemma is incredibly well done and necessary given the current state the world is in.
Directed by Jeff Orlowski.
Written by Davis Coombe, Vickie Curtis & Jeff Orlowski.
Starring Tristan Harris, Jeff Seibert, Bailey Richardson, Joe Toscano, Sandy Parakilas, etc.
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐/10
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