Ron’s Gone Wrong is a family-friendly animated movie about a “walking, talking personal-connection device” that has some major operating issues. In other words, Ron the robot is broken. But that doesn’t stop his owner from having a great time with him and learning important lessons along the way.
Ron is a Bubble-Bot—a capsule-shaped robot on wheels designed to help kids stay digitally connected with their online friends and followers and to identify new friends with similar interests. Bubble-Bots (or B-Bots) can change their look, chat with their owners, take photos and video, stream live to the Internet, and interact with other B-Bots.
Advertised as a “Best Friend Out of the Box,” Ron the B-Bot literally fell off a truck and lacks the ability to connect with his server. So his new owner, awkward middle-schooler Barney, has to teach Ron how to be a friend the old-fashioned way.
This debut film from Locksmith Animation is mostly about friendship and personal connections. It’s also a searing indictment against social media platforms and the cost of using them.
Lessons for the kids
What I loved about Ron’s Gone Wrong was the simple message to kids that we can be friends with people who aren’t exactly like us. At the very least, we can be friendly instead of letting our different personalities and interests build a wall between us. The film also shows kids that online “likes” and “follows” can’t replace real life friends who like us just the way we are.
Oh, there’s one more lesson: Friendship is a two-way street. If we want people to be friends with us by getting to know us, spending time with us, and liking the things we like, we should make an effort to get to know them, spend time with them, and like some things they like.
Lessons for the adults
There’s also some important lessons for adults in this film. In fact, some adults could learn a lot from the lessons aimed at the kids. But we’re also given a lot to think about regarding the cost of using social media and other online platforms that gather our personal information to provide personalized service to the individual user.
The first lesson is that platforms like Facebook and Instagram are not our friends. They are businesses that provide a service and receive something of value in return. Nobody is setting up a multi-million dollar operating system and employing thousands of people to run it just because they want to be friendly and make the world a better place. They want to make money, and one way or another, they are getting something of value from you in return for your use of their systems.
The same is true of Google, Apple, Amazon, and other tech giants. They make money off of you using their systems, so they will do what it takes to engage you, seduce you, and keep your interest so you spend time seeing their ads and using their products instead of going somewhere else.
All these tech companies are getting something from you, mostly personal information that can be sold to other companies or used to make you more dependent on their products and services. But you might be losing even more than the tech companies are gaining.
Too much time online results in the loss of real-life connections. Too much posing online, showing off our perfect or interesting lives, results in losing our own authentic identity. And too much dependence on the reactions we receive online results in emotional stress and self-doubt.
There’s another lesson here for adults that could be overlooked. Those algorithms tech companies use to keep us using their products do more than harvest our personal data. They use that data to keep showing us the things we like, the people we like, and the things we agree with—to the exclusion of all else.
The biggest lesson
The explosion of communication technologies in recent decades has made it so easy to lock ourselves into an echo chamber where we only hear and see ideas and values that reflect our own ideas and values. Everything inside the chamber appears good and right to us, while everything outside the chamber appears bad, false, and even dangerous. The more we stay inside our personal preference boxes, the deafer we become to the world around us and we miss opportunities to connect with other people, get to know them, listen to their opinions, and learn how to meet their needs.
If you want your world to revolve only around you, the tech giants are more than happy to take your time, money, and private information and give you your own personal online experience. But, if you think life should involve more than just having your own needs met, you need to get offline, get out of your box, and go be a friend to someone who isn’t just like you.
And see Ron’s Gone Wrong. You’ll enjoy it.
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First Image by Pezibear from Pixabay.
Second image by RawPixel from Deposit Photos.
Third image by stokkete from Deposit Photos.
Fourth image by Hannamariah from Deposit Photos.