An Analysis of Netflix Movie The Social Dilemma

An Analysis of Netflix “The Social Dilemma”
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The Social Dilemma
An Analysis of Netflix “The Social Dilemma”
Netflix released a documentary ‘The Social Dilemma’ on September 9, 2020, which has moved one of the most momentous human history developments – social media's arrival. The documentary shows how technology manipulates the user’s mind using an algorithm to encourage advertisement while risking customer privacy. They create an addiction through technologically innovative tools and tactics to spread addiction among users. Through professional interviews and dramatization, intriguing dialogues, music and framing, the filmmaker succeeds in resonating the theme of the negativity spread by social media and their specific harmful impacts on health. The central theme of “The Social Dilemma” is to criticize social media's dark aspects and its harmful effects on users' mental health.
The filmmaker has launched a hybrid documentary on Netflix to emphasize the movie is underlining theme, presenting an amalgam of factual interviews and dramatization. A few interviews are more influencing than others. For example, Tim Kendall, the former leader of Pinterest, monetization executive of Facebook, is the CEO of Moment, greets at the beginning of the movie. He shares his anxiety and concerns about the race of social media sites. His new app, ‘Moment,’ is targeting to break this addiction. Another character of the movie Jaron Lanier is quite attention-grabbing, who has left each social media site while taking pain in unveiling this addiction's harms as a professional writer. He talks about his book, “Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now”, another with a similar purpose.
Moreover, Tristan Harris, who co-founded the Center for Humane Technology, warns people about software technology's destructions. He shares his ideas as an expert worker with considerable experience at Google and various social sites (Bossio, 2020). In short, the characters in the movie indicate that social media sites are harmful either based on their personal experiences in the tech industry or their philosophical approach to the problem. Such as, Lanier considers the constant addiction to social sites as a threat to civilization. Meanwhile, Harris motivates the users to delete their social media accounts by setting a valiant example herself and her literary contribution to the movie's thematic value.
The movie employs meaningful dialogues to set the harmful addiction to social media into the viewers' heads. For example, Edward Tufte said that only two industries worldwide name their customers as ‘users’: “illegal drugs and software.” This comparison shows how the movie emotionally manipulates the viewers' feelings to get insight into social sites' evils. Another controversial dialogue from the movie is Daniel Hovermann, who calls the free software users as ‘product’. Hence, he ethically emphasizes the negative impact of using free series of social sites. Above all, the movie begins with Sophocles’ famous quote, “Nothing vast enters the life of mortals without a curse”, which logically defines the extreme disapproval of the blind social media addiction. Likewise, the filmmaker has resonated with the theme of eradication of online socializing addiction due to its harm through the thread of dialogue binding all the scenes. On the one hand, they make the movie effectively run the series of specific scenes accentuating the value of human life VS the highlighted addiction; on the other hand, the dialogues collectively impact the human psyche to reconsider their socializing habits apps (Minow, 2020). The movie is laced with similar dialogues conveying compelling logos, ethos and pathos to persuade the audience to delete their social media accounts. The purpose is to restore pre-social media status and the values that it has eroded in the process.
The documentary “The Social Dilemma” structures a soundtrack that works perfectly well with the movie's thematic thread, directing at something horrible with unpredictable consequences. The soundtrack is like a horror music composition while featuring the seamless use of authorized music. It makes the documentary flow smoother to keep the audience on the proposed track to get insight into the reality of social media addiction. The movie's various background sounds involve many string instruments, and episodic tunes played on the piano. The movie's overall effect...