Justice and Geographies of Power

The Social Dilemma (2020) 

The film The Social Dilemma is a documentary that dives into the fears and pitfalls of social media and how it affects today's society. Jeff Orlowski, the director of the movie, interviews multiple executives from top social media platforms including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Pinterest to hear their side about the functions on the sites that they created and how they ended up taking control of 2 billion people's lives. This panopticon, otherwise known as Big Brother, has been tracking our data to essentially create a 'digital ego' of ourselves to predict our wants and needs. These platforms have so much power and have manipulated human behavior to the point where we do not even need to talk to each other. We just open up apps to get our daily news and entertainment intake, browse and shop around on predictive advertisements, and obsess over getting likes and comments from people we do not even know to be rated on popularity. 

While Fruitvale Station and Son of Saul have very different plot lines compared to The Social Dilemma, there is one thing that is the same: while it may not be in sight, the fear still lingers. In Fruitvale Station, Oscar Grant was an unemployed African American man who was trying to get his life back on track. He had been in prison before and he knew he did not want to go back or get involved with the police again. When he had his altercation with the police, he tried to plead his innocence when all of a sudden he got shot in the back by one of the officers. Many people on the train captured video of the incident on their cell phones which was then spread around social media. As mentioned in The Social Dilemma, information can spread very quickly and cause social change. Since the videos of Grant's encounter spread around Facebook, it caused protests all over the country demanding social justice and police reform. Without the power of social media, the Fruitvale Station story would not have been looked at.

Son of Saul was very much so based on mind control and inflicting fear onto those who were not involved with the Nazi party. Saul was a Sonderkommando member who worked for the concentration camps that killed other Jews in gas chambers. The film is very personalized to Saul's experience working in the camp so much so that sometimes main characters are unidentified for quite some time to demonstrate the psychological chaos going on in that environment. This can somewhat be applied to The Social Network because people follow bloggers and influencers on social media and grow attachments to these people that they do not even know. Common people are consumed by these influencers that they think they know every aspect of their life when they really only know what they see on their screens. This psychological chaos is caused by social media and is changing the way people interact, shop, and believe in. 

The Social Dilemma (Roger Ebert)

'The Social Dilemma' Review: Unplug and Run (New York Times)

"Fruitvale Station" and the Weinstein Company's Push for Social Justice (Mother Jones)

Son of Saul (Roger Ebert)