Do we really have a perspective of our own anymore?

The Social Dilemma on Netflix can be called the reason behind this blog, but it would just be the pretext. I did initiate this blog piece after watching the aforementioned documentary last year, but it's a culmination of various ideas from the documentary along with many ideas and questions that I have wanted to bring out through my blog but never came through with doing so.

At what point will we start realizing that whatever radicalization is happening around us is not because of the government or whosoever else we tend to blame for that?

 

We need to realize the existence of these personality and mindset changing things around us, which we use every day. The things which affect us without us having a clue about that happening. Whatever information we learn in schools and our homes affects us in what we do and how we are. In the same way, the information we consume on the internet shapes us in the way we live, from our reactions to our thoughts. And in this information age, that influence could come from anything around us, the government, the society, the culture. 

If we had a communist party as the ruling party, the political radicalization would have been different. If the Asian culture had influenced the Indian culture, people would have had a completely different ideology and problems.

We see all this polarization happening around us when we are on social media. We come across some new information, we then post more of our thoughts about it, again on social media, or end up arguing with others with a different perspective. This is precisely the kind of positive feedback loop any social media platform is looking to take advantage of; this helps them increase the user activity on their platform, improve the engagement of the user, which eventually allows them to earn more money. And at the same time, it helps them to push users more relevant content to feed into this vicious cycle.

As humans, we tend to be attracted to people with a similar personalities. In the same manner, we tend to continue using a platform and consume content specifically targeted to us. Which is served to us simply with our own activity data on the platform. 

I'll take a political example because, surprise, surprise, that's the first example that came to my mind being an avid news reader, and our general news is filled with it. It is pretty evident and a known fact that when our current government came into power, it brought in the ideas of Hindutva and similar emerging ideas into our society. But can you really blame them for that? I mean, the political party came into existence out of that very same ideology. What we should ponder is how that ideology has started affecting the people, polarizing people.

Suppose one has the perspective of a liberal, or leftist, or bhakt or whatever else people believe they are. In that case, that's effectively nothing but one being a victim of an algorithm that has been optimized to keep a person engaged on different platforms. I am not saying that they're not related to our personal beliefs at all, that's probably like the seed, but our information consumption is what helps it grow and nurtures that perspective. We try to propagate our views onto others because we believe it is the correct and best perspective. This eventually leads to polarization, and it leads people into political extremes.

The Social Dilemma (Image Source: IMDb)

"People think that the algorithm is designed to give them what they really want, only it's not. The algorithm is actually trying to find a few rabbit holes that are very powerful, and trying to find which rabbit hole is the closest to your interest."

When the internet/social media is capable of making a certain set of people believe that the earth is flat despite it being a well established and logical fact that the earth is not flat. Something, where there's a very thick and proper line of difference in the two sides. Imagine, what it is capable of making people believe in the case of the topics where there's a very thin line between two perspectives and no proper and clear fact supporting any of them.

And as of today, there's already a niche set of people talking about the effect of social media in changing behaviours and people's mindsets. These companies are equally aware of that and are now instead of trying to solve the problem, they're actually trying to make this more discreet.

Also, many of the people reading this might have already thought about this, and might be already aware of this fact, and are proactively taking steps to mitigate this, but has anyone ever stopped for a moment, and thought, do we really have a perspective of our own anymore?

Comments? To fuel more such algorithms... :)