The Social Dilemma and APA Formatting

The goal of this week's blog is to provide commentary on the Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma and to review key rules and applications of APA formatting.

    The Social Dilemma, directed by Jeff Orlowski gives insight through various interviews of tech professionals how social media works behind the scenes. This documentary reveals how AI works, how people respond to social media, and how people are addicted to social media. Platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, and so on have artificial intelligence scripts which run in the background predicting the best ads or videos/tweets for you to view. Ultimately, the goal of these companies programming these algorithms and machine learning programs is for you to stay on their website so they can generate revenue. One excerpt in the documentary that stood out to me by one of the interviewees was that "If you are not paying for the product, you are the product." This impacted me because this shows how big tech and social media businesses are generating money not just through people's financial support but by mesmerizing people's minds to stay hooked on their website and frankly become addicted. In fact, one of the key figures in the show stated that's precisely the way these algorithms were designed: to dominate your attention, keep your focus, and consume your time. 

    Personally, I did not like the over-dramatization and embellishment that this documentary portrayed of Ben who falls pray to social media addiction. I think this documentary could have been more effective if they had dived into more how these algorithms work and how programmers make them. It would have been greater if the producer had shown in real time the direct results these algorithms produce rather than embellishing the documentary like a Hollywood film. Perhaps they could have gone into a Facebook engineer's office and given the audience a chance to see what is actually being made. Otherwise, I see the over-dramatization of the AI's having a personality as a negative affect on the documentary, cheapening what artificial intelligence actually is and creating an atmosphere of fear to the viewers that they are being spied on.  

    One other thing that I would like to mention that this documentary exposed is disinformation in social media. Indeed, this film touched on hot topics such as vaccines, election hacking, and riots. The documentary implies that a vast array of disinformation has ciphered its way through social media which has proliferated massive and wide-spread deception and false information. My take on this as a Christian is to test everything I hear (1 John 4:1) and to bring under intense scrutiny anything that is not in line with the Word. I ask questions to new and spreading information propagated by the mainstream news asking to myself, "Said who? Were they there when this took place?" One source may state that it has been proven by data and scientific research that such and such is going to happen. "What data?" is my response. Additionally instead of thoughtlessly accepting what one source may say, I study to show myself approved, rightly dividing the word of truth and digging in and through out to see what is correct and not correct (2 Timothy 2:15). Finally, I always check for the witness inside of me to discern truth (John 16:13; Romans 8:16). 

Furthermore, APA formatting is a common type of paper formatting most researchers use. APA stands for American Psychological Association and it is an industry standard format writers use to avoid plagiarism and publish their work. This format consists of credible, peer reviewed sources which are great to have if you want to make your work official. Microsoft's Word has a feature where you can open a APA formatted document and customize it to the way you want so you don't forget the basics. 

An APA paper usually consists of the four basic elements:

• Title Page
• Abstract
• Body
• References

Within these basic elements certain rules must be followed. The paper has to be written in 12pt font Times New Roman and be double spaced. There has to be 1 inch margins and a Running Head on the left as well as a page number on the right. A running head is simply a shortened version of the title of your paper written in capital letters.

The abstract is a shortened paragraph summarizing and synthesizing the main ideas and message of your paper. The abstract is not indented on purpose. Also, no data should be given to the reader in the abstract.

The body of your paper is where your main ideas are put and organized. In the body paragraphs you can create section headers to help the reader understand what each main idea is on. APA body paragraphs don't have to be in any certain way; the author can get creative and choose how many paragraphs they want for each idea. However, the author must implement various data, statistics, and quotes from creditable sources in the main body paragraphs.

You can find credible sources on your favorite data base such as JSTOR or Google Scholar. Stockton University also has its own database you can access if you are a student.

Another important feature APA formatting requires is the use of in-text citations. In-text citations usually feature a signal phrase before it which explains why the information you are going to read is important.

Finally, on the references page you must list the references you used in your paper. The main thing to remember is to use a hanging indent. However, APA can get quite specific on how exactly you should format your references. For help on this I recommend using the online tool KnightCite to generate correct APA formatted references. 

For more information and tips on APA formatting see here.