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India.com
a day ago
- Entertainment
- India.com
6 Films That Capture The Truth Behind Gen Z's Social Media Life- In Pics
photoDetails english 2944405 Updated:Aug 11, 2025, 11:22 AM IST Introduction 1 / 8 Aren't we all caught in the digital dilemma? Endlessly scrolling, swiping, comparing ourselves to others, building the perfect social media presence, all while handling the peer pressure. But deep down we all know that it's wrong and it's draining us but we still can't stop. These six films will give you reality checks you need and avoid. Kho Gaye Hum Kahan 2 / 8 This film is about three friends experiencing life together, their careers, relationships and self-image. It shows how likes, comments, and curated feeds can quietly shape our real-life choices. The movie portrays both the thrill of sharing everything and the emptiness that follows with it. The Social Dilemma 3 / 8 A compelling blend of documentary and dramatization, this film will show you the truths you are running away from. It explores how algorithms subtly influence what we see, think, and even movie will work as a wake-up call that leaves you questioning every swipe and scroll. CTRL 4 / 8 It's a screenlife thriller film which revolves around the story of a couple who are influencers but after they break up, the girl turns to AI to remove his ex until it takes over the control. It dives into the paradox of having infinite access to information while feeling increasingly trapped by it. Eighth Grade 5 / 8 This amazing film follows the story of a young girl who is struggling to have a social media presence to show off her friends. The movie captures the insecurities, self-discovery, and relentless self-comparison that come with being online at a young age. Logout 6 / 8 A thoughtful movie shows the dark side of digital fame. The movie explores the themes of identity, belonging, and fear of missing out in a hyper-connected generation and the deeper truths emerge about who they are without an audience. It's as much about silence as it is about noise. Unfriended 7 / 8 This screen life supernatural thriller makes the digital interface feel eerily alive. It uses real-time interaction to build tension while exploring the darker side of online communication. Beneath the suspense, it's a sharp commentary on accountability in the digital era. Conclusion 8 / 8 The digital world can be thrilling, inspiring, and even life-changing but it also comes with shadows we often choose to ignore. These films peel back the glossy filters and curated feeds to reveal the deeper truths of our hyper-connected lives. The movies will teach us that the solution is not to log out forever but to login and use digital media with awareness.
Winnipeg Free Press
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Winnipeg Free Press
Freaky, fun throwback to Disney's cheesy past
This new body-swapping sequel isn't as good as Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan's original 2003 mother-daughter mix-up. But neither is it a cynical, cash-grab update. Instead, Freakier Friday's multigenerational mayhem — we now get a four-way switch — has the kind of cheesy, clunky sincerity that's been powering Disney live-action comedies since The Love Bug days. It's overly busy and not particularly original, but it manages a sweet, hokey vibe and benefits from return performances — now even more lived-in — by Curtis and Lohan, with some fresh support by The Good Place's Manny Jacinto. Sixty-something Tess Coleman (Curtis) is still working as a therapist, along with doing some obligatory podcasting (expect some tech glitches). She's trying to help her daughter Anna (Lohan), now a music manager and single mom, raise rebellious teenager Harper (Julia Butters from Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood). Tess calls it 'intergenerational co-parenting.' Anna calls it 'undermining.' Family issues get even trickier when Anna has a meet-cute with Eric Reyes (Jacinto), a widowed father who's just moved from London to Los Angeles with his daughter Lily (The Social Dilemma's Sophia Hammond). Anna and Eric fall in love, but when they plan to get married, their respective kids balk. Harper is a dressed-down surfer girl, while Lily is a high-style snob. They don't get along. On top of the usual challenges of blended families, there's the question of whether the gang will end up living in L.A. or London. Misunderstandings abound and problems seem insoluble, at least without magical intervention. Thankfully, this time out, scripter Jordan Weiss (Dollface) has abandoned the 'exotic Eastern mystery' ploy of the 2003 entry and is instead going with Madame Jen (SNL's Vanessa Bayer, in a funny role), a New Agey psychic/life coach/Starbucks employee who somehow engineers a two-part identity swap. Come midnight, Anna and Harper switch bodies, which reprises some of the original movie's dynamic, while Tess and Lily do the same, which feels more like an arbitrary add-on. While the sequel's mechanics are undeniably freakier, then, having more plotlines ends up feeling like less. In the 2003 film, there were very distinct doubled performances, as Lohan played first a mutinous teen and then a multitasking middle-aged mom stuck in the body of a mutinous teen, while Curtis went in the opposite direction. This not only made for good comedy but allowed for a focus on the characters' mother-daughter emotional issues. Here we have more of a generalized generational face-off. Lily and Harper, in their new status as adults, scheme to sabotage their parents' upcoming nuptials, while learning how to play pickleball and marvelling at how many tissues Tess keeps in her pockets. Meanwhile, Anna and Tess, now in adolescent bodies, mostly enjoy gorging on junk food and bending without their joints cracking. There are some comic high points — like a very intense dance class led by SNL's Chloe Fineman — but overall, Freakier Friday has fewer laughs than the original. Rather than exploring individual characters, Weiss's scripting too often defaults to generic gags about Gen Z/millennial/boomer mismatches. Direction by Nisha Ganatra (Transparent) is high-energy but sometimes gets a bit too frantic. A high-school bake-sale food fight, for instance, just feels like a waste of butter and eggs. The cast does what it can. The younger actors, Hammond and Butters, are clearly talented but don't get to exhibit the range the 17-year-old Lohan did back in the 2003 flick. Weekly A weekly look at what's happening in Winnipeg's arts and entertainment scene. Curtis, of course, has been having a terrific later-life renaissance in such projects as The Bear, The Sticky, The Last Showgirl and Everything Everywhere All at Once, and she's game for anything here. Lohan is finally getting a much-deserved comeback after being pummelled by the pop-culture machine that so often punishes young female stars. It feels good to see the pair back together. And while the men of the Freaky Friday franchise tend to be charmingly irrelevant, Jacinto's gorgeous, funny, self-deprecating turn really affirms his potential leading-man quality. There are loads of nostalgic callbacks. (It's not necessary to have seen the first flick to understand this one, but it will help with the in-jokes.) There are drop-ins by Anna's old bandmates and her little brother. Mark Harmon once again provides a calming influence as Ryan, while onetime '90s cute-boy Chad Michael Murray gets a chance to redeem the awkwardness of his 2003 role as Jake, the high school employee who was (sort of) romancing both a 15-year-old and her mother. That bizarro setup gets a knowing joke in the last scene here. The premise of the Freaky Friday series is partly about how the passing of time can change our outlook. This outing doesn't quite replicate the magic of the original, but by drawing affectionately on the older story while adding some youthful updates, the cast and crew of Freakier Friday mostly 'make good choices.' If you value coverage of Manitoba's arts scene, help us do more. Your contribution of $10, $25 or more will allow the Free Press to deepen our reporting on theatre, dance, music and galleries while also ensuring the broadest possible audience can access our arts journalism. BECOME AN ARTS JOURNALISM SUPPORTER Click here to learn more about the project. Alison GillmorWriter Studying at the University of Winnipeg and later Toronto's York University, Alison Gillmor planned to become an art historian. She ended up catching the journalism bug when she started as visual arts reviewer at the Winnipeg Free Press in 1992. Read full biography Our newsroom depends on a growing audience of readers to power our journalism. If you are not a paid reader, please consider becoming a subscriber. Our newsroom depends on its audience of readers to power our journalism. Thank you for your support.
Daily Maverick
04-06-2025
- Business
- Daily Maverick
In the age of AI, content is everywhere — but are we still telling stories that matter?
Content might be multiplying, but is it connecting? Is it resonating in the way great stories once did – not just engaging but anchoring us? Last week on Substack, AI marketing expert Charlie Hills penned a sharp, clear-eyed provocation: Content is Dead. Long Live Connection. It caught me off guard and held me there. Not because content is dead (it's not – it's alive, omnipresent, flooding our screens in formats we couldn't have imagined five years ago), but because Charlie is right to point us towards the deeper issue: connection. Content might be multiplying, but is it connecting? Is it resonating in the way great stories once did – not just engaging but anchoring us? That question has never been more urgent. We're living through a supercharged shift – a reformatting of reality – as artificial intelligence enters its next act. The race to create has become a sprint. With just a few prompts, almost anyone can make anything. Art. Music. Dialogue. Essays. Sales decks. Songs. Films. It's dazzling. And yet – it's also flattening. Because what we're seeing now isn't just a technological leap. It's a philosophical one. One where the difference between originality and replication, between human thought and predictive patterning, is collapsing in plain sight. The race to the bottom of the brainstem 2.0 Back in 2017, Tristan Harris – former Google design ethicist turned activist and leading voice of the Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma – warned of a phenomenon he called the race to the bottom of the brainstem. Platforms weren't just competing for time or clicks, he argued. They were competing for the most primitive parts of our brain: our instincts, our fears, our compulsions. Whatever could trigger outrage or anxiety – that's what won the attention war. The consequences are now well known: fractured focus, polarisation, social fatigue, and perhaps most disturbingly, a generation trained to skim, not think. But what's unfolding now feels like a spiritual sequel to that. A new race. This time, not towards the base of the brain, but towards the end of originality. Because AI doesn't think. It predicts. It doesn't dream or deliberate or dissent. It calculates likelihoods – what's most probable, based on patterns of the past. It does this with extraordinary sophistication, but its engine is built not on insight, but inference. And so, just as Harris warned us about platforms hijacking attention, today we face the subtle creep of something just as worrying: the erosion of human uniqueness through the mass rehashing of content. Is content dead? Its intentions appear warped To be clear: content isn't dead. It's thriving in volume. We have never had so much access to ideas, essays, videos, podcasts and posts. But the question is no longer how much, but how meaningful. Because when content is generated by tools designed to mimic – not originate – we have to confront a brutal truth: intention matters. In the past, 'content' was less polished but had raw, unpolished soul. We sought stories – in church, around the fire, at the pub – to make sense of life. It feels like now we are just 'wading through' a river that has broken its banks. Today, we scroll. We skim. And increasingly, we wonder: who wrote this? Did anyone? The horse bolted. What now? Perhaps the horse has indeed bolted. The tools are here. Anyone can now produce passable content – indistinguishable at a glance from the real thing. But 'passable' is not the same as 'powerful'. And this is where our opportunity lies. It is possible – and urgent – to use AI not to replace creativity, but to amplify time. Let the machines handle the mundane. Let them assist, support, scaffold. And then use the time you get back, not to produce more noise, but to reconnect with the very essence of being human. It's not easy when someone hands you a magic wand to stop tapping things, I know. But time is a wonderful thing. Time to think, to read or for a long-overdue lunch with friends. The greatest threat AI poses is not to employment, but to enchantment – to the spontaneity and serendipity that defines art, love, humour and originality. And we must see that our kids will need this mentorship in connection and relationship as time goes on. LinkedIn's demise Nowhere is this shift more visible than on LinkedIn. What once felt like a platform for raw professional reflection – real people, real ideas – is slowly becoming an uncanny valley of templated inspiration and machine-stitched leadership. You can sense the AI-ness. The bland polish. The synthetic sincerity. It sounds right, but it feels wrong. The solution isn't to quit. It's to reclaim tone. To sound like yourself. To say things that don't sound like anyone else could say them. To use tools for acceleration, but let you do the speaking. The real winners in this AI era will not be those who extract the purest margins or fastest output. They'll be those who master the balance: AI and humanity. Efficiency and empathy. Data and depth. They'll be the ones who deploy the extra time AI gives them to become more human – not less. That could mean more family time. Or mentoring. Or writing something messy and bold. Or just watching a film without checking your phone. Whatever it is, it's the redeployment of time towards meaning that will mark the new creative class. Final thoughts: A call to be seen This isn't a Luddite's lament. This is a call to awareness. We're at a cultural fork in the road. AI is here, and it's extraordinary. But it is not us. It can assist, but it cannot replace. And if we let it mimic the soul out of our storytelling, we will look back and realise we lost something irreplaceable – the texture of being alive. So no, content isn't dead. It's dynamic and alive, its production value is better than ever, but will anyone care if they think it's fake. We will be digging harder than ever for connection. That's the new gold in marketing over the next few years. Much harder to mine, but more valuable than ever. My business partner and CEO, Mike Butler, doesn't lean on AI much at all. He doesn't need to. He is a master of caring about people's outcomes, asking questions, probing for strategic insights and value and for nurturing relationships. He unlocks the most value in our AI business, ironically. Our entire team would agree. I would have my kids use AI well but drive with Mike's foundation for how to relate to people. Let's not settle for attention. Let's fight for connection, which will mean that humans adapt to bring the elements of what we see, what we read between the lines, by dialling up human insight and relationships and humour. DM
Yahoo
24-03-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Twin City Issues Report Exploring the Impact of AI on the Digital Landscape
The Digital Attention Crisis: Navigating AI's Influence Minneapolis, Saint Paul , March 24, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- a leader in connecting communities within the Minneapolis and Saint Paul area, today released a report that delves into the profound impact of AI on the digital landscape. As AI-powered algorithms increasingly dictate online behavior, businesses and individuals face unprecedented challenges in maintaining control over their digital presence. The report is available today via the Twin City Digital Attention Crisis The report highlights the dramatic rise in digital consumption, with doom scrolling increasing by 40% since 2023. Users now spend over seven hours daily engaging with AI-curated content, a trend that raises significant concerns about mental health and social media addiction. The American Psychological Association reports that social media addiction rates are now comparable to traditional substance abuse metrics. The report shows that AI's role in manipulating user engagement is evident, as platforms employ real-time dopamine feedback loops to keep users engaged longer. This manipulation extends to search engines, where AI-driven results prioritize AI-optimized content, reshaping traditional SEO strategies. "The digital landscape is evolving rapidly, and it's crucial for businesses and individuals to understand the implications of AI-driven content curation," says Clayton Johnson, CEO of "We must advocate for transparency and ethical AI use to regain control over our digital interactions." As awareness of AI's influence grows, cultural leaders and digital professionals are pushing back against algorithmic control. Literature and media, such as "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism" and "The Social Dilemma," have sparked conversations about AI's role in shaping digital behavior. Meanwhile, music and digital art projects like HyperPrompt's "Attention Economy" highlight the dangers of algorithmic addiction. Leaders face the dual challenge of protecting human-centric values while harnessing AI's potential for growth. As AI reshapes the digital landscape, enterprises must strike a careful balance—leveraging advanced technologies to drive efficiency, personalization, and competitive advantage, without sacrificing user trust and ethical responsibility. The report urges forward-thinking companies to proactively align their marketing and content strategies with the evolving, AI-first environment stand to dominate their industries. By emphasizing transparency, responsible policy use, and genuine user empowerment, these organizations will not only differentiate themselves but also establish lasting connections built on authenticity and integrity. Twin City's report states that now is the moment for businesses to step forward as champions of responsible innovation. By embracing AI-driven tools ethically and strategically, enterprises can reclaim control over digital experiences, ensuring technology empowers and enhances human potential rather than diminishing it. The goal of the report is to show that the future belongs to those who use AI to elevate human interactions, foster meaningful engagement, and build sustainable, trusted relationships with customers and communities alike. Read the full report on the Twin City City MarketingAbout Twin City Discover the best of the Twin Cities. Whether you live here or are new to Minneapolis and Saint Paul seven county area, you can find everything you need to connect and succeed. Press inquiries Twin City Clayton Johnsonclayton@ 2585 Hamline Ave N #CRoseville, MN 55113 Sign in to access your portfolio
