Teenagers sleep with their phones clutched tightly in their hands, despite it being password protected. Priests do puja and in between keep looking at their messages. Phones can ruin relationships, lives if not used in moderation. Those days are gone when we tell our children to read newspapers not just to improve their vocabulary but also think and analyse articles and form an opinion for themselves. These days no child has time to glance at a newspaper, they say they read news on the phone. What is this news on the phone flashed in cryptic messages? Is it enough to make you think, analyse and decide if there is some substance in it or not? Everyone has an agenda in this world, from people, to channels, to newspapers and to any company. They just feed you information and we believe it, parrot it to others as if it some sort of some ‘gyan’. Fake news and fake information has intruded our lives and all our time is gone arguing if this is true or not, debating its pros and cons. In this process someone else is making money at our expense as we become addicts to social media; It is indeed like a drug. In the gaps of consciousness we refresh information sites, hungry for more. Our weakness has been observed and capitalised even before we know.
Netflix’s ‘The Social Dilemma’, directed by Jeff Orlowski, that was released on the streaming platform on September 9, 2020, is making headlines for all the right reasons. The documentary talks in depth about how in this age of information technology we don’t know what the ‘truth’ is. It talks about ‘fake news’ and it’s consequences and how we are moving from an age of information towards the age of disinformation. In what comes across as an urgent warning for our generation, the documentary captures interviews with some well known Silicon Valley non-conformists and fictional dramatizations of the consequences when the characters Johnny and Janey scroll through their social media feeds all day.
