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The Great Hack Documentary by Amer and Noujaim
Introduction
The Great Hack is a cinematic piece that presents the internet competency of modern society. This documentary is an original Netflix movie, which offers an investigation conducted by journalists revolving around a private British company Cambridge Analytica and its potential interference in more than 200 presidential elections around the world. The aforementioned company retrieved its information for further political interventions from millions of Facebook users, naturally, without their consent.
Therefore, the documentary provides the viewers with food for thoughts regarding their social media usage, which, unfortunately, in most cases ends with data breaches, hacked accounts, and unauthorized entries into the accounts. Overall, this paper seeks to evaluate the impact of the documentary on the viewers through investigating the rhetorical strategies that the creator employs to present the concerning issue to the target audience. Furthermore, the analysis aims to realize how the aforementioned tools help the viewers relate to the problem of social media.
The Target Audience of The Great Hack
It is vital to explore what viewers might relate to the plot of the documentary to understand the movies purpose and the directors idea of capturing the audiences attention. Needless to say, in the modern world, almost every person in the age group from 10 to 60 is on the basic level acquainted with technologies. However, people between 15 and 45 tend to spend more time online; therefore, the film is generally oriented toward this age group. Young adults between the ages of 15 and 35 belong to the so-called new generation that has been using technical devices almost from their childhood and does not understand the hazards of social media. That is why The Great Hack aims to reach the users that realize the potential repercussions of social media to remind them of this existing problem, explain the size of the issue, and suggest different ways of reducing the caused damage. Furthermore, the documentary attempts to explain to active and average internet users why it is highly crucial to protect themselves and use various tools to reduce their activities traces online.
The Employed Tools to Capture the Audience
The significance of cyber safety is clearly portrayed throughout the documentary, primarily by presenting the companys story that violated the rights of social media users. Furthermore, directors utilized various tools and methods to popularize the movie; however, even its purpose may be fascinating for the target audience. For instance, the case introduced to the viewers can happen with everyone, meaning that the audience may relate to the issue of the documentary and learn from the mistakes of the characters. Moreover, the information is introduced by diverse speakers, scientists, data analysts, and professors in a serious tone to make the audience understand the issues importance.
Visual Effects in the Documentary
Naturally, The Great Hack illustrates the problem that is happening on screen, so the directors sought a way to show the viewers the social medias algorithms. In his interview with IndieWire, Karim Amer states that they wanted to use visual effects to explain to the audience that it can happen not only during elections but also in internet users daily lives (Thompson, para. 12). Therefore, graphic artists opted for illustrating the whole complexity of technology: pixels, texts, and screen grabs (Thompson, para. 12). Undoubtedly, such a representation of something untangible as personal data stored online had a more significant impact on viewers as they could understand how social media works inside and out. In addition, the directors presented the meaning of the issue and that everyone can face data breaches or have their personal information compromised for more influential peoples advantage.
Emotional Suturing
The documentary revolves around the horrors of social media problems and their impact on the users; hence, the creators utilized the plot to make the audience emotionally invested in the storyline. The Great Hack gives the audience a new understanding of data as a powerful tool that can cause much damage in the wrong hands. Personal information is portrayed as a tool for blackmail, theft, crime, prejudice, and even knowledge. Data thefts influence every sphere of peoples lives, from education to construction, business, and medicine. That is why the directors illustrate the feelings of ex-employees and voters, whose lives were destroyed by Cambridge Analytica, considering that the company used public personal data for blackmail. Consequently, the emotions and feelings of the characters make people think about how the same situation would make them feel and how they would recover from it. Naturally, the directors sought to accomplish such thoughts from users, so they could become more protective over their online activity and the information they store on the Internet.
The Cultural and Political Contexts
Furthermore, implementing interpretation of history and culture in the documentary can show the audience that the story illustrated in the cinematic piece already happened to people and, obviously, can occur again in the future. That is why The Great Hack possesses a unique cultural context that depicts diverse approaches to information in daily and professional lives along with peoples culture. The movie generally views such a company as Cambridge Analytica in many political campaigns as the ones of Barack Obama or Donald Trump, for example. Hence, the film mentions American electoral culture and social medias impact on the choices voters opted for making in the past and still continue nowadays. Namely, Cambridge Analytica used public data to recognize the ways of controlling the public, We had just spent 14 months working on the Ted Cruz campaign & to hand (it) over to the Trump team (The Great Hack, 00:13:52-00:14:02). Hence, such a political systems representation leads viewers to realize how corrupted and manipulative this sector is and the great lengths that politicians tend to go to illegally obtain public opinions from the Internet.
Additionally, the movie possesses a solid historical context along with the described cultural and political contexts. Undoubtedly, the political system has consistently been full of corruption, manipulation, and persuasion from politicians and influential people in this sector. However, nowadays, political representatives employ social media to influence public opinions for their benefit. That is why the characters presented by the directors illustrate the masses that are easily controlled by online platforms, where people cannot understand what is real and what is not. Hence, the film tries to depict how these choices prescribed to people by social media and constant advertisement affects public culture, social environment, and the economic situation. Donald Trumps example explained how the candidates public image differs from the actual situation. By representing all the hidden techniques of American election campaigns, The Great Hack highlights that the future president should be chosen based on their qualifications, personal characteristics, actual achievements, and suggested development programs. Overall, it is underlined that the created and shared public image should not be overtrusted; instead, people should analyze the situation by themselves.
Conclusion
To sum up, the documentarys directors aimed to present to the audience the horrors of modern social media and how such, at first sight, harmless entertaining platforms can destroy lives. The creators opted for using visual effects, emotional suturing, and background contexts to explain the seriousness of the issue to the viewers. The aforementioned tools were implemented to capture the audiences attention and urge people to be more thoughtful and safer online, not to be blackmailed or threatened by their valuable personal data.
Works Cited
Francis, Mark. Smoke and Mirrors: The Bio-Con Documentary in the Age of Trump. Film Quarterly, vol. 74, no. 1, 2020, pp. 69-74. Web.
Seadle, Michael. The Great Hack (Documentary Film): Produced and Directed by Karim Amer and Jehane Noujaim. Journal of the Association for Information, Science and Technology, vol. 71, no.12, 2019, pp. 1507-1511. Web.
The Great Hack. Directed by Karim Amer and Jehane Noujaim, Netflix, 2019.
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