Of the docu-faces part of this docudrama (well - it's ninety five percent documentary really) only Jaron Lanier was familiar to me, but the rest had held high level positions in all of the big names - think Facebook, Google, Snap-chat, Twitter, etc) and the tale they told made for uncomfortable viewing by any standards. Data harvesting, political influencing, the deliberately addictive nature of the systems used, subliminal influencing, the rise in teenage mental illness and suicide, it was all there presented as a coherent whole.
I have myself eschewed the use of the major social media sites - I found much of the exchange banal and puerile on the breif sojourn I had into it - and do not feel I have missed anything thereby. From my recent haiku thread you will have noticed that I have no flair for expressing myself in 280 letters (
) and in respect of Facebook, my experience in the shop in which I worked was that it was a huge scource of mischief and engenderer of animosity between people (barely a day went past when I didn't hear a conversation in which the "he posted - she posted" theme didn't feature - and it was never in a positive way).So for me this film was really just a confirmation of that which I already suspected/knew, but it was good to have it from the horses mouth. In terms of viewing it makes for a couple of hours of fairly attention grabbing stuf. In the final summing up the guys who had just shot down their own Frankenstein, tried then to resurrect it with a few banal recommendations about how we needed to 'take back control' and the like, and they do give some good tips about do's and don'ts at the very end of the film, but only Jaron Lanier had the balls to say what I would have advised......turn the frikkin' stuff off - forget about it. As the man said, "It's a beautiful world out there".
