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Solving ‘The Social Dilemma’ With Emotional Intelligence
‘The Social Dilemma’ calls for regulation of social media, but here’s how we can regulate ourselves.
Social media isn’t pure evil, and it isn’t the only technology that is potentially problematic. In a world in which powerful companies are competing to sell our attention to the highest bidder, this is a call for us to pay more attention to ourselves. It’s a call to practice understanding how we feel, what we actually want, and how to tap into our power to take action.
The Netflix documentary, “The Social Dilemma”, tells the story of how the technologists behind social media are intentionally changing our behavior to turn us into “easy prey for advertisers and propagandists,” as Devika Girish summarizes in The New York Times review of the film.
“The Social Dilemma” is accused by some of telling this story in an overdramatic way, but it nevertheless contains valuable insight into our relationship with social media. The content and features put in front of us by services like Instagram are not random. Social media is designed to change our behavior and our emotions – often, in ways that we did not explicitly consent to and which may not align with our goals and values.
We live in a society that conditions us to distract ourselves from our emotions so much that it hurts our ability to know ourselves, know what matters to us, and to live the lives we want.
To compensate for our lack of self-awareness, we sometimes take on the emotions and values other people, or algorithms, tell us to have. We follow leaders that don’t deserve us because they tell us how to feel and why, and they permit us to express ourselves in certain ways. We let algorithms tell us what we want because it’s easier than asking ourselves what we need.
This works well for social media companies like Facebook and Instagram because they sell the ability for a third-party to change our behavior. This third-party’s intention may be to sell us a product (you know, the one that keeps coming up in your feed), win our political allegiance, or convince us that the world is flat. The problem is, we don’t know the goals of these third-party organizations and we didn’t consent to be influenced by them. They may motivate us to do something that we would not independently choose.
Gradually, more and more of how we feel, what we think, and what we do may not be motivated by our own values and goals. Our emotions, thoughts, and actions could instead be influenced by the highest bidder for our attention, making it even more challenging to understand ourselves and making us even more vulnerable to influence from outside.
Regularly checking in with yourself, at least as much as you check your Instagram feed, can help you understand how your relationship with social media needs to change, and it can give you the willpower to take action.
KELLY, Kristi. Sol.ving ‘The Social Dilemma’ With Emotional Intelligence. Publicado em 21/09/2020. //medium.com
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