‘The Social Dilemma’ is an eye opening Netflix documentary hosted by the Tech elite who have engineered the internet, software and algorithm platforms for social media. These expert digital engineers highlight how social media was designed to be a psychological, persuasive and manipulation tool to hack our psychology and behaviour habits with an intention to unconsciously seduce and demand from us our maximum attention, engaging with a purpose to create an addictive habit through a dependence of continual checking in and connecting, giving us the feel good dopamine fix. Dopamine is a feeling good neurotransmitter that releases a chemical between other neurons in the brain which contributes to feelings of pleasure and satisfaction as part of our reward system. These algorithms monitor our online behaviour building digital models to predict our actions.

The Artificial Intelligence is becoming increasingly smarter at predicting what we want to see, hear, buy and even vote for. The experts also affirm our online engagement time is tracked and a personality profile is formed, knowing when one is feeling lonely, depressed, bored etc. The tech experts call this ‘growth hacking’ and whether we want to admit it or not, social media platforms are influencing our psychology and behaviours.

There is no real human or moral supervision online, but more concerning how is this impacting and influencing our younger people? Gen Z especially regarding their mental health.
Could this be connected to the alarming increase we are seeing in emotional apathy, aggression, children’s depression, anxiety, bullying, self harm and suicide?

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Is it an over reaction? Or a wake up call to take our personal power back.
We can all take our power back by putting ourselves on pause, we don’t need to be distracted and engaged all of the time, it’s not great for our wellbeing….get creative outside the tech world and get connected and creative in the human world….

If you haven’t seen ‘The Social Dilemma’ may I suggest you do….to be forewarned is to be forearmed!

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