Anton

Are you joking? The sparse facts interspersed with relentless dramatisation are barely enough to warrant one star, let alone the two I've (reluctantly) given it. While The Social Dilemma does make a few good points, we are told that social media is the great evil of the world every day. Its one unique selling point - how social media actually works to foster "addiction" - falls embarrassingly short. For a start, there was not one cogent opposing view put forwards. The best they managed was one white-haired and white-skinned old man claiming that this has all happened before and is nothing new, accompanied by the vague nodding of a skeptical-looking techie. Nothing actually opposing the absolute opinions of the cherry-picked interviewees, which is concerning to say the least. Where's the interview with that white-haired man? Why are the only views shown those of those who fit the docudrama's agenda? (Where, for that matter, were the women and people of colour? There were a few, but the vast majority shown were young white millennial men.) If they can't prove the opposing arguments wrong as well as patting themselves on the back, they have not argued their own points successfully, and they throw their own credibility into doubt. Very few meaningful statistics. They did claim at one point that instances of suicide in preteen and teenage girls has been on the rise since social media become a wide phenomenon, but there is also a correlation - not a causation - between movies Nic Cage was in and drownings that year. There was no evaluation of the data, no theorising that maybe there were other causes, or that the picture is more complicated than it seems. (To be fair, if "documentaries" like this were on the rise along with social media, I would feel less inclined to live, myself.) Their only real proof, to use the term loosely, is anecdotes. Anecdote after anecdote. And while anecdotes can and often do form a basis for further research, they are not research. They are not a substitution for evaluated data. And if it's not useless personal stories, then it's worse-than-useless dramatisation. The harrowing tale of a family and their phone-addicted children sounds terrifying until you realise that it's scripted. Not only is it scripted, it's ridiculous - he is being controlled be three nefarious men in his phone, playing him like a puppet. All the theatrics do is distract from the points they're trying to make. If they rely on this kind of thing to make their point, how good is the point they're trying to make? It had lots of potential, but they ruined it themselves for all the reasons above and more (I won't go on). Did it make some good points? Absolutely. But when they obscure it with the very one-sidedness that they're apparently trying to root out, it's impossible to tell which is diamond and which is rough.