Pros and Cons of Social Media

The Pros and Cons of Social Media

Social media has become the internets’ most powerful platform of the 20th century, and it’s constantly changing. Little by little, it has been programming the minds of society without their knowledge. The pros to social media, is that you can obtain certain information to learn things, while the con of social media is designed to keep you dumbed down with entertainment and gossip. The average person is on social media daily at least 8 hours or more a day. No matter where they are, work, church, a red light, or at the family dinner table, people are on their phones on some type of social media platform. People tend to think that these platforms are free, but in reality, they are not. Tristan Harris, a former design ethicist of Google said, “If you’re not paying for the product, then you are the product”. The real agenda of social media is to control the way people think and to keep their constant attention. Shoshana Zuboff, Phd, a Professor Emeritus of Harvard Business School said, “It’s a market that trades exclusively in human futures.” Everything people online is being monitored from watch you watch and how long you look at it.

Eric Snowden told people that terrorist weren’t Americas’ top people to spy on and that the American people are who they spy on the most. The internet giants use social media to collect data that tells them when people are sad, lonely, depresses, when people are looking at photos of old girlfriends and what you are doing late at night. With all of this data they build models that will predict what a person would do. These people have created a world where people are being manipulated each every day. Arthur C. Clarke said, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” This means that the people that we think are smart like doctors, lawyers or builders don’t understand how vulnerable the mind can be. Even the people that worked for these companies building their base have said that they didn’t know of this the agenda themselves, as far as what these companies were doing with the data. Jaron Lanier, Founding Father of Virtual Reality and Computer Scientist has written a book called,” Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now.” Although these people are telling others what’s behind the curtain, they will never take it serious because the illusion has already taken it’s effect.