I have been recently hearing about a Netflix documentary titled “The Social Dilemma” which was released earlier this year in January of 2020. I haven’t yet seen it but have been hearing about it more and more in the last few weeks. I saw the trailer for it today and basically, it's about tech experts in the social networking business blowing the whistle on the dangers of it in our society. Before I watch the documentary, I wanted to type out my thoughts on the subject before being subjected to the views of others in the documentary.
The internet, The World Wide Web went live to the world in 1991. Ever since its creation, the World Wide Web has only grown in size and has connected us humans across the world like never before. Now with that connection, that web that we have helped build does come at a cost. The cost isn’t in the form of sweat or hard labor, it’s at the cost of something even more costly, it’s priceless, it’s our precious time and sanity of our beautiful mind. The World Wide Web just as the name implies is a digital web, It’s just like the web that a spider builds. If you think about it, the web in both scenarios has a purpose, the spider’s web helps to catch it’s prey and the World Wide Web helps to catch our time. The World Wide Web is a tool that Social media companies have exposed to capture our time just like spiders use their web as a tool to capture their prey. The more time that we spend on these social media sites the more data we are sharing about ourselves, what we think, what we feel, what we like, and what we don’t. Technically we are giving away our mind in a sense to the social media companies if you think about it, we are what we think, feel, like and dislike etc.
The social media companies know more about you than your own family, your own spouse and children just by collecting data on what we do daily on their platform. The more data that they collect, the more they can classify it’s users in a population, separate us by like and dislikes, and then use that data to target us by anything that they set their algorithm to. The algorithm is a process or set of rules (computer implementable instructions) that programmers can create at their own discretion. We the social media users are providing the information for the variables that programmers use to create their algorithms, which is then used as meaningful data to target its own users. That’s like Napoleon Bonaparte, one of the greatest French military commanders in history taking the time to writing down his plan (data) of attack and sending his plans to all his adversaries before every war. Do you see the problem with that? The element of surprise is completely taken out of the equation, so is the guessing game of companies trying to find and target us for advertisements. There is a reason that these billion-dollar companies don’t charge for their platform, trust me it’s not FREE. The more data that they collect for FREE from us the users the more they can charge other companies to target us with direct advertising on the data that we freely have given away. We haven’t ever lived in a world that had so much of our personal data out in the world. There will be implications in the future, The Psychosocial human experiment that we are all participating in will have its results whether we like it or not. It’s been almost 30 years since this experiment started back in 1991, and the stakes in the experiment are only getting higher now that social media companies like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, SnapChat, TikTok etc. have such a large presence in the world wide web. Below is a timeline showing the start dates of the major players in The Psychosocial human experiment;
World Wide Web went live August 1991
Google start date September 1998
Facebook start date February 2004
Youtube start date February 2005
Twitter start date March 2006
Instagram start date October 2010
Snapchat start date July 2011
TikTok start date September 2016
Here is a twist on all of that nonsense, an idea that I thought of just as I was day-dreaming while writing this blog. How about we build a social media site that still collects data on it’s users, but only this time it sells that data to advertisers that we chose based on our own likes and dislikes. Here’s the catch, the social media company that has been selling our data pays it’s users a percentage of the monthly or quarterly profits that advertisers are paying to target it’s users. The social media users get a check from the advertising revenue based on the data that was sold per individual. The advertiser’s cost for customer acquisition becomes tighter because now it’s targeting users that want to be targeted. Now that’s a win for the user in the form of income, the social media site wins by being more transparent and thus encouraging trust, and the advertisers win by streamlining their advertising by cleaning out all the white noise.
Open to any suggestions, it’s just an idea. Whoever wants to help build “Thee Social Site” feel free to send me an email Calderonmedicine@Gmail.com
Head up, Eyes Forward
