Most of you may have spent a few hours recently watching Netflix’s latest documentary — The Social Dilemma, which became an overnight sensation with the masses and has been making quite some noise since. With a script that keeps you engaged and walks you through a suburban family’s lifestyle and how social media changes their course, it does end up leaving you questioning quite a few norms of the 21st century.
While a normal reaction would be to rethink the level of involvement of social media and OTT platforms in our day to day lives, another thought that persisted in my head was what if the same movie was another medium manipulating our thinking. What if we’re being led to believe the truth that everything we see on social media is a lie?
Although it is a fact that most of what we read may just be someone’s fiction but interpreted as what is actually the truth — there is always a side which is actually the truth. 2 sides to every story, 2 heads to everyone coin. How do we conclude which is which? How do we contemplate the news that gets delivered to our handhelds every second of every day? How are we supposed to comprehend or react?
This led me to believe, do our opinions really matter? Does anybody care what we think of something? Does it matter how we consume it?
Half the news out there — fake or true, have been made public just to get the audience engaged and respond. But it has not been written any where that we need to react and share our opinions of the story with another. While it would make a good conversation over coffee with a set of friends, what we don’t realize is we are initiating a silent chain of “passing the message.” You can think of this as a game of Chinese whisper. What starts as sensible information is lost over its course — eventually ending up completely different from what it was. Thus, there are so many different versions of the same truth.
But what if we limit the opinions to ourselves? What if it stays in a room and the 100 modified versions of it do not go out? Would that help at all? I think on some level, it could. Think about the consequences on a global scale?
At the end of the day, the generation today is definitely seeing a different range of problems. Climate change and resource depletion being in one place, but also impact of fake media. The repercussions, if not thought about, could again be something we never knew possible. So why not do what we can at the moment, and save everyone’s energy? At the end of the day, opinions can always reside inside a journal or in my case, a blog post. ;)
