Is social media making your decisions?

Every single day you make small decisions that add up to how your life looks. These decisions might be something that you buy, or what clothes you wear on a particular day. Maybe they are bigger things, like changing career, or who to vote for in an election. What would you do if you knew somebody was trying to change you by influencing small decisions you make every day? These changes would alter the way you think about the world, affect your ability to make informed decisions and influence what you see and how you act. For you, this would be a social dilemma.

That person is social media.

This is the premise of the Netflix documentary ‘The Social Dilemma’. With interviews from former leaders of technology companies, including the co-creator of the ‘like’ button, it uncovers the reality of how social media is affecting us. And it is not what either us or the social media companies themselves signed up for.

We didn’t sign up for this…but neither did they

I am sure you will have heard conversations surrounding how much data social media companies collect from us; and I am not sure we signed up for this. Or maybe we did by ticking the box to agree to the long terms and conditions; but this is not what I, or the social dilemma is focused on. It isn’t about how much data we are providing about ourselves, it is how it is being used.

The business of social media is the attention economy. In the documentary, the line…