Reference no: EM133416675

Assignment:

In Feb. 2021 I wrote an op-ed in Minding the Campus, "Why I Don't Allow My Students to Use Google," (see , which discusses some of the problems I had detected with students' replacement of traditional sources (like books) with Google searches. Although I wrote the piece after Netflix released The Social Dilemma (Sept. 2020), I had not heard of The Social Dilemma until I watched it in 2022. Your textbook (pp, 346-350) describes many of the unfortunate effects of smartphones and social media including reduced happiness, technoference (P. 346), the shallowing hypothesis (p. 348), alienation, and reduction in self-esteem. Of course, it also discusses social media's many positive effects (which presumably is why 4.6 billion people use it).

1. (a) What are positive and negative effects of social media? I grew up in the 1950s and 1960s, when television was still new. Television, like social media, Google, and other recent technologies, uses viewers (no different from "users") as the product and the commercial sponsors as the customers, but few saw this as an important issue in those days. The AMC series Mad Men (2007-15) depicts the advertising culture of the 1960s, and Vance Packard's Hidden Persuaders (1957) and Wilson Bryan Key's Subliminal Seduction (1973) debunk traditional and television advertising much as The Social Dilemma debunks internet advertising. Several of the commentators in The Social Dilemma see the sale of user models to advertisers as a crucial point concerning internet technology, but all advertising involves that kind of relationship.

(b) What is different about Facebook and Google from television, radio, print, and other previous media?

2. In The Social Dilemma Jaron Lanier says that the gradual, imperceptible change in users' behavior and perception, slight changes in thinking about which you are unaware, is at the heart of surveillance capitalism. Later in the film he adds that social media has placed deception at the heart of communication and that to the generations of Americans born around 2000 and later the meaning of communication and culture is manipulation. (This is a claim that has long been made about other forms of advertising and the mass media almost since its inception.

Karl Marx, who is the godfather of the claim, said that selling is alientation. Unfortunately, though, states founded along Marxist lines have uniformly failed politically and culturally and have introduced death camps and totalitarian surveillance, including unlimited, totalitarian uses of surveillance technology in socialist China right now.) Lanier adds that we've put deceit and sneakiness at the center of everything we do. In light of the textbook reading, which discusses positive as well as negative effects of social media, what is your assessment of the costs and benefits of Google, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other social media outlets for you personally? Are they worth your time?

3. What would make you better informed and more capable intellectually: (a) To spend three hours a day reading classic books like Gibbons's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Hamilton, Madison, and Jay's Federalist Papers, or Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations--or three hours on social media? (b) If reading classics is more beneficial, why do 4.6 billion people focus on social media while almost no one focuses on classic books?

4. Throughout history, the people who made the most money thought differently from the mass of humanity, including both aristrocrats and commoners. If you think the way that television or the education system says that you should think or in the way that deceptive social media algorithms induce you to think, you will by definition think like everyone else. Rothschild is reputed to have said, "Buy when there's blood in the streets," i.e., do the opposite of everyone else. The great New Yorker PT Barnum, the inventor of modern public relations, is reputed to have said, " A sucker is born every minute." The attributions of both quotations are doubtful, but the point is that you make money by playing off others' irrationality or gullibility. If AI finds ways to manipulate masses of users, how might this present investment opportunities to you if you refrain from overindulging in AI-linked technology?