One time my teacher has showed me a docudrama called ‘The Social Dilemma’, this documentary has inspired me and helped me to make further decision on my coursework. The way of how they use drama and interview to support each other to reveal the dangerous and the effectiveness of social media has let me learn a lot, and also helped me to decide the topic of my documentary.
The Social Dilemma is a 2020 American docudrama film directed by Jeff Orlowski. The documentary examines how social media's design nurtures addiction to maximise profit and its ability to manipulate people's views, emotions, and behavior and spread conspiracy theories and disinformation. The film also examines social media's effect on mental health, in particular, the mental health of adolescents and rising teen suicide rates.
The documentary opens with a white coloured phrase “Nothing vast enters the life of mortals without a curse” from Sophocles, with black background to create contrast to get the audience’s attention and settle done the style and tone of this docudrama. Black represents as secret and dangerous, white would be represent as pure, save, and truth, which telling audience this phrase helps people to see the reality, telling people the truth, it’s guiding audiences to think and see as different way, or maybe, more negative way. Sophocles is one of three ancient Greek tragedians, audiences who knows him and the phrase, would know have more depth of understanding about what’s going to happen next.
Before the phrase is introduced, a very low key drum sound has played, revels a feeling of dangerous to the audiences, telling audiences what’s going to happen is not good or maybe audience are going to explore a conspiracy, to see the dark side of the world.
After that, interview has started, interview subjects were all a part of social media company and played an important role, but they all resigned because of problems like ethics issues. While the interviewer having conversation with the subject, feels like they are friend and chatting rather than they doing Q&A, this would allow the subject to speak more and feels more comfortable. However, the easy relax atmosphere has created a big contrast with the phrase and non-diegetic music at beginning.
After all interview subject has introduced themselves, they started to ask their thought and concerns of social media, the reason they choose to interview those people is because they were a big part of the social media, some of them even designed part of social media, therefore what they said of social media, would be and would make audience feels more trustable. After the interviewer asked the subject “is there any problem (of social media)”, subjects were all like a lot to say and don't know where to start. Then the drama part of this film has started. This drama has settled in a modern age and a normal family, which telling audiences this tragic is happening everywhere and could happen on everyone. The reason this film producer choose to use drama and interview of experts, is really to let people aware and concern about the issue within social media.
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