Recently, a big group of tech experts and activists, who used to work at companies like Facebook and Google, have founded an organization that has the main aim to raise awareness about what they believe are the negative effects of social media and technology on society. Social medias have actually turned us anti-social.
The Silicon Valley insiders are now acting as outsiders in launching their new organization called “The Center for Humane Technology”. They are starting a campaign called “The Truth About Tech”, funded in part by $7 million from the non-profit media watchdog group “Common Sense Media”, which will help the drive of the movement forward across the country and the world in advance.
Other major companies who are participating in The Truth About Tech are Comcast and DirecTV by donating some $50 million in free media and airtime for the tech ethics campaign.The Center for Humane Technology campaign is especially worried about the negative effects of unchecked tech use and social media on children, which are often seen ad adolescents, but they mainly want to educate the youth on those problems.
“The largest super comuters in the world are inside of two companies — Google and Facebook — and where are we pointing them? We’re pointing them at people’s brains, at children,” said Tristan Harris, previously a tech ethicist at Google and co-founder of The Center for Humane Technology, in an interview with the New York Times.
The Truth About Tech campaign, which will be modeled after successful anti-smoking crusades, will focus on 55,000 public schools to teach students, parents and teachers about the puzzling and gruesome side effects of too much tech use, such as depression, which are becoming more and more common in American children and not only American ones but it is a tendency that is going viral through all parts of the world, that we live in.
There are people who used to work for Facebook on important positions and share the initial ideas of the company when it all started – to make people addicted. They describe how the psychological studies went on to get to know our brain and emotions, causing some short dopamine shots when we receive likes, which causes an addiction similar to drugs, which is terrifying. People don’t understand that they are even addicted, which is one of the sights seen at those who need rehabilitation. It is time for us as a society to start looking for solutions to these problems, as they will soon become most likely irreversible.
