The Social Dilemma
My Top 9 Top Takeaways from the Netflix Documentary
Yes, somebody is watching YOU.
I admit that I started watching the Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma thinking I knew most of what they would say. I’m an educator who has been to social media workshops (they will scare you), and I am a mom who has faced serious, life-threatening challenges with my own teenagers that were caused (in no small way) by social media. I read up on everything and had a lot of meetings with professionals. I thought I had a better handle on this stuff, but it turns out I was naive.
The Social Dilemma documentary premiered at Sundance in January and is now playing on Netflix. The documentary is based on Tristan Harris’s research and a presentation he did in 2013. Harris, while working as a “design ethicist and product philosopher” at Google, put out his presentation internally at Google, A Call To Minimize Distraction & Respect Users’ Attention, and it serves as the jumping-off place for the documentary.
The cast includes Tim Kendall, the former president of Pinterest, Jaron Lanier, a computer scientist and philosophy writer, Asana co-founder and Facebook’s Like button co-creator Justin Rosenstein, Stanford University Addiction Medicine Fellowship program director Anna Lembke, among several other giants in the industry.
