How to avoid being stolen our time for the media to make money and manipulate us.
“The social dilemma”
Social networks were created as a product to help people solve problems and make many daily jobs more quickly and efficiently: to communicate better, to perform scientific research and calculations much faster and access lots of information immediately. Nevertheless, the development of social networks and their widespread use, which include nearly everybody worldwide, has changed their goals and this is causing lots of serious issues.
The reason is that the objective of social media has switched to making money and, for this purpose, they need vast amounts of users to be connected for the longest time possible every day.
As a consequence of this new objective, a lot of undesired social problems are arising: addiction, mental health conditions, child depression, dysmorphia due to the use of filters and photos shopping which has created a completely unreal body stereotype; news manipulation which risks peaceful social coexistence, namely, democracy; and many others.
As I said before, Silicon Valley started selling products, but now they sell people, types of people to engage as targets of their products. We have got used to finding anything on the Internet for free, but when something is free, you are the product, you are the price.
The media compete for your attention, for getting as much as your time as possible, and the result is changing your habits, your thoughts, who you are.
They offer the companies the certainty that their product will be seen, and, for that purpose, they need great amounts of data about people, about users. Therefore, they trade in human future and they have plenty of money to achieve that.
How do they accomplish their plan? They monitor everything you do, say, see, how long you spend on the Internet, you personality, mood – if you are happy or depressed -, your health…. As a result, the systems knows a lot about us and makes better predictions. They create models which predict our actions, and the one with the best model wins.
Nowadays, media are no longer a tool, they have goals. We can’t avoid using the phone; we have to use the phone to communicate with our friends, because they communicate with it; and when we use the phone, we find notifications and we click on them, and they lead us to other appealing headlines on which we click and we see adverts and we close pop-up adverts, which will follow us, because when we click on the “x” to close it, we give the net information that will allow them to follow us.
The result: we were going to send a message to our friend and ended up spending half an hour doing things we had not thought of doing. Furthermore, as he spend more time in the nets we forget about previous interests, our previous normal life, like having a driving license, or going on dates, meeting friends face-to-face, reading, doing sport … we have become addicted to the nets.
When we used tv there used to be rules to protect children when watching it, even cartoons; today technology takes advantage of human weaknesses and we suffer manipulation and polarization.
Computers learn quickly what they should offer to us, so we spend more time in front of the screen, and has turned us into a product. Algorithms learn how to improve adaptation to our desires. On the other hand, we do not control algorithms, they learn by themselves.
Google offers you the results you want, based on the knowledge of your thoughts and needs. Facebook offers different people different news, adapted to your interests and likings. They create your information, the information of your group – that means, the people who share similar thoughts to you -. And then you look at others and think: “why don’t see the same?” And they do not see the same because they are offered the news which best suit their personal profile – the one the algorithm made by following you and learning from you -. This way they make into groups, tribes, and they generate polarization, confrontation between groups of people who perceive reality differently because they are being given different views of reality, not true reality. In addition, conspiracy theories grab people’s attention much more than reality and truth.
For profitability, the system biases towards false information because it makes companies earn more money. Truth is boring, whereas sensationalism attracts people. Fake news on COVID, conspiracy theories, rumours of virus spread by China, the influence of 5G, or the idea of the vaccine implanting a microchip in our body to control us – by the director of a Spanish university -, became the most followed and shared news and the most influential.
Youtubers, most of whom do not have an education or experience of life, brainwash our minds by telling us they want to inform, protect and save us, when their basic goal is getting more likes and followers to monetize their sites. Promoting racism, anti-immigration and hatred is really profitable; as profitable as dangerous for democratic coexistence.
For Facebook it is very easy to find 1000 people who share the kind of thoughts someone needs to promote a certain idea or political bias and reaction, and spread it quickly. Russians used Facebook to manipulate people before the USA elections.
If we do not agree what is true and false, we cannot solve the problem. They use us as part of a system with a goal.
THE PROBLEM IS THAT THE NEW GENERATIONS, WHO HAVE ONLY LIVED IN THIS SYSTEM WON’T BE ABLE TO SOLVE THE PROBLEM, because they have not known a different world, they cannot compare.
It is normal that a company makes money, but there must be regulations, because self-regulation doesn’t work, since the only goal is money, as much money as they can make. They do not care about social or environmental disasters.
A healthy society needs to change things.
Some rules to prevent manipulation and addiction:
-Disable notifications and recommended videos: choose.
-No devices in the bedroom. There is life outside the net: life is outside the net.
-No social networks until 16, when children are able to decide.
-Time budget: how much time we will devote to social media
