social media and society | BrianJPombo.com

Brian shares his thoughts on the impact of social media on society today.

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Transcription

The problem with “The Social Dilemma.”

Hi, I’m Brian Pombo. Welcome back to Brian J. Pombo Live.

I got to see the Netflix special, The Social Dilemma, if you haven’t seen it, and you still subscribed to Netflix, or have someone you know that subscribes to Netflix, get on there and watch that one, it is definitely worth watching.

There’s a problem with it.

But let me give you the basis of what it’s about. And I’m not going to ruin it. There’s no way to ruin it. It’s documentary. Okay.

The basic idea is they’re talking to people who big people, people that were major forces behind the development of current day social media, everything from the inventor of the like button on Facebook, to the team of people that helped develop YouTube, just one person right after another.

And they discuss with them what the problem is with social media in terms of how it how it basically, through poor design, in a sense, sets us up all against each other, and keeps us in a very, ever shrinking bubble, that we just stick to the things that we like, and keep ourselves in an echo chamber to where we don’t even see what everyone else is seeing, thereby making everyone else appear.

So completely wrong and different from us.

And if you watch it, you’ll see yourself in it in some way, shape, or form, you’ll see yourself even if you don’t have much of a access to social media, you will see how this has affected you and everyone around you how it’s affected politics, how it’s affected everything.

That part of it I completely agree with my main issue with the movie is is mainly and well, let me tell you something else I agree with, they tend to end up putting the people that are seen as the bad guys, the heads of these corporations, the people that started it, the people that are that are in control of it.

They take them out of just the absolute, being demonized creatures, and show them as really being probably people that just don’t understand what they’ve gotten themselves into and how they got there and how to get themselves out of it.

Not that they aren’t smart people, but that they have fallen into a situation to where the AI, initially the algorithms that are all set up. And the business models have got them stuck.

Now here’s here’s the points I disagree with on this movie. If you’ve happened to see it, if you haven’t seen it yet, go watch it. One of the things they end up blaming is profit in the movie, by the end of the movie, they’re basically blaming the profit motive as being the issue, or the business model as being the issue.

And that’s the real problem. I don’t see it like that.

I see it as a modeling issue as a thing, something that can be changed from the inside. But it is not it’s I don’t believe it’s the problem of of the profit issue. I really don’t I think that this is this is a problem of poor design, and have a lot of people that are in control wanting to put their mark on it, wanting to make things better in life.

And by doing that, in they they’ve fallen over into the side of manipulating intentionally or otherwise. And that’s pretty clear about the statements. If you look at this debt, which they don’t go into in the movies, the is the philosophies of the people that are running things, the guys that started Google, the guy that started Facebook, and the folks that started Facebook, all these different people, their philosophy show why they designed it the way they did.

But they don’t see it as people in the movie don’t see it as a philosophical problem. They see it as merely a an issue with the marketplace. And I just disagree on that. The other main thing, though, that plays into what we’re talking about here, which is when we’re discussing business, and how to build up build your business and how to work around the large monoliths that are out there, like Amazon.com, which I’ll mention in a second.

But if you’re talking about Amazon.com, as I see it in the same way, is that what you really have is a situation where things have always been like this.

The people who are bringing you free content have always been bringing it to you like this. I was having a conversation with a gentleman here locally. That’s going to come out in our show, Grants Pass VIP, his name Steven and we were talking about it and he mentioned, You know, it’s always been like this, if you think about what was the top thing in the 1950s in a row in the 1960s.

And on television, what were the top TV shows, and most of them all fit in the category of a soap opera. Why were they called soap operas?

Well, the soap operas were developed on radio, initially. And they’re called soap operas, because they were developed by Procter and Gamble to sell soap is that, and the main idea is that any form of free content that’s out there, is trying to sell you something, there’s something being slipped in somewhere, to try and convince you to do something that you wouldn’t normally naturally do.

And that’s kind of commerce, that’s kind of how these things run. The only issue is, when you’ve got Facebook, it’s so interwoven, and so automatic, and so extremely good at what it does, and has so many fingers in the pie, any one of you, you or me can get on Facebook and sell our wares to the exact same people.

It becomes dangerous, because the people don’t know what trapped there under who are participating in it. And so it’s I think it’s important for everyone to watch it just so you see that part.

But I also know that people can also get outside of that, and find a way outside of that, by participating in other forms of media. By cutting back on their social media, my wife was just telling me today about how she’s cut back on Facebook.

And what a huge difference she says like having one less kid to take care of the day, we have three kids, okay?

So it’s like having one less kid to take care of. And it’s just it’s one of those things that it’s enlightening if you can pull back outside of these traps, but these traps are not absolute, we can get around them.

That’s my my viewpoint is that there’s been traps before we the soap opera used to be something that completely engaged especially during the daytime, with housewives, were completely obsessed with soap operas, even I remember as a child, that was the case that my babysitter and so forth, were really aware it was a almost an addiction.

But we we worked ourselves out of that. And we work ourselves out of some out of this too. And I think it’ll become something else. But you got to have awareness, you got to have people discussing it. It’s a very hot topic.

I don’t think it should change how you do your marketing though. If you’re honest, if you if you’re offering something that’s good for people, and it’s high quality, and you’re doing it at a good price, and there’s no reason why you should worry about these things, sell where you can.

Don’t worry about the larger issues, the larger issues will take care of themselves. Hopefully that’s helpful to you. Hey, if you want to know really how to take advantage of these monsters out is these giant behemoths in the marketplace like amazon.com I came up with a book, 9 Ways to Amazon-Proof Your Business.

You go and check that out. You get a free copy at AmazonProofBook.com.

We’ll be back here tomorrow. Talk about more tips. Sometimes I give a little put throw toss a little review in there once in a while but we’ll be back tomorrow night. In the meantime, get out there and just let the magic happen.