The pernicious (dangerous) part of social media is this: With social media, we are being trained by these algorithms to think differently.

You can train a dog through pain (shocks) and pleasure (food). It is very easy to train a dog to do as you want them to do, via shocks and food. There is a concept of ‘Pavlovian training’ (or Pavlov’s dog, or now ‘ classical conditioning‘). We are being conditioned (without even knowing it) The biggest danger of the ‘feelies’? It embeds us with pleasant feelings, and ultimately distracts us, and turns us into passive consumers.ģ. When we are bored, the best way to entertain ourselves is to mindlessly start scrolling through our Facebook/Instagram/Snapchat feeds, by reading on our favorite blog/websites, by watching Netflix, or just playing games on our phone or consoles. Now why is this a problem? Well, we have the modern day concept of the ‘feelies’ (Netflix and games). Suddenly you feel more, perceive more, and experience more. Imagine smoking weed, taking LSD, and watching a movie.

Imagine watching a movie, and literally feeling more sensations when watching the film. The ‘feelies’Īnother interesting concept in Brave New World is this concept of the ‘feelies’.

Thus, our behavior is modified in order to keep hunting for more likes. Through ‘reinforced learning’, we are trained to like getting lots of likes. Whenever you get a ‘like’ on social media, you get a shot of dopamine. Like crack cocaine which fits in our front pockets. Whenever you have any ‘bad thoughts’, you can go on a ‘soma holiday’ - by taking a few grams of SOMA, to drown out all these ‘bad feelings’. In this future dystopia world of BRAVE NEW WORLD, there is a drug called ‘soma’. “Better to take a gram, than give a damn.” I am a huge Aldous Huxley fan, and one of the most influential novels I’ve read is BRAVE NEW WORLD - a future dystopia which is very very accurate in terms of how we’re living our lives today.

Brave new world movie 2018