How Does Jeff Orlowski Use Docudrama

ow does Jeff Orlowski use docudrama in his documentary The Social Dilemma to emphasize addiction and how it leads to the alarming amount of time people spend on the internet today?

Jeff Orlowski does an excellent job of revealing the dangers of social media in his Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma. The documentary is wonderfully thought out. It explains every aspect of social media and how it affects us. In fact, its use of docudrama in particular emphasizes addiction to the internet and how it leads to the alarming amount of time people spend online today.

The docudrama scenes could be considered a film itself inside the documentary. We are first introduced to a family who is struggling to get their daughter to put her phone down. “Isla,

It really is like an addiction. Orlowski continues to represent this struggle by using a visual graphic. During the film, notifications from the characters phone’s appear on the screen. It’s almost as if social media is taking up physical space. It acts as a barrier in our real lives. It shows how social media distracts us from what is real. Another important element

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introduced to us in this first scene is the brother-sister duo. Throughout the “story”, the sister warns her brother, Ben, about his addiction to his phone. Ben of course does not think it’s a problem. He is very trusting of his phone and everything it tells him. His sister, however, thinks for herself and is determined to show her family that they do not need to be on the internet constantly. The sister acts as a foil for Ben throughout the documentary. It is often easier to side with her when Ben acts brainlessly. It is just an additional feature that convinces us that addiction to the internet is a serious problem.

To show us the cause of addiction to the internet, Orlowski creates a series of scenes that take place from inside Ben’s phone. Inside the phone, there are three men that personify

“engagement”, “growth”, and “advertisement”. These men give us a visual explanation of

Tristan Harris said “It's almost as if they had this avatar voodoo doll-like model of us.” The film gives us another computer-generated graphic that represents Ben. It shows how his “voodoo doll” is manipulated and controlled by the advertisers. This simile is very effective in showing the audience how the internet does not care that they are people. The system views them as a product, not a consumer.

And to be able to make money, they need to keep you online as long as possible. Even when you are not on your phone, these companies have methods of bringing you back. One method they use is tagging. “So, if you get an email that says your friend just tagged you in a photo, of course, you’re going to click on that e-mail and look at the photo. It’s not something you can just decide to ignore.” (Jeff Seibert). This is an excellent point to bring up that many viewers probably never thought of. Orlowski considers tho show us how this works by giving us another docudrama scene where Ben gets tagged in a photo in class. Of course, he stops paying attention and continues to stay on the phone while the companies make more money because they are showing

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him more