Today, our lives are entirely different from the ones we had a decade ago. Well, that happens every decade, that's called growth, evolution, change, generational shift, xyz, right ?. Well, wrong.
Our lives have gone through a paradigm shift in the way we interact with the society.
If I told you 10 years ago to have an argument with a person you have never seen, or known, over something as silly as which software or website is better, you probably would have doubted my sanity. How has it all changed and why?
Social media, how it was known, was created to put the internet to better use, to use the internet so that people may engage in life-like interaction, show emotions, maintain groups, have discussions, in a way transpose an image of their real life social network. Well, pretty harmless. People who have been on orkut, gtalk, yahoo messenger, myspace have seen the first generation social media. Those people can testify to the fact that social media was not what we are seeing today.
What went wrong ?
Money. Money got involved.
Social media rose above being just a website or a little windows application. It started evolving into money making platform. That is when the aim of such websites, rather than providing the user a more close to real life experience, started developing into platforms that can keep you hooked as long as possible. The role of a psychologist in the online industry became bigger than ever. User engagement - the key to success of these websites. If a person not turned the "public" feature off. Anyone can comment on what they say. How they look. How they feel about something. One gets liable to get a response to what they post. Public is a default feature, remember. The tendency of humans to reciprocate the majority, to express the better version of themselves in public, the reward mechanism (likes and shares) all woven together, changed the users in such a way, that we shifted from the time we avoided posting any personal information online to times when we have instagram, where we share pictures of every little thing we do. Hardware technology was transforming hand in hand to make this easier. Camera phones were not so easily accessible. Neither high speed internet, nor the one touch apps. But the thing you got to understand is that it's not the technology which gave birth to how social media is today, rather it is the opposite of that. But something to ponder upon, were we sharing information or opinions on our social media with the whole world too ? Did we use to do it in our offline lives ? Sharing how we feel about something in an open space, or blasting our opinion over a megaphone ? No, it would have been ridiculous, right. Yes, right. We could have discussed politics, sports, entertainment, etc. in our closed circles. And we would have been open to get criticized for, or commended for the same from the limited set of people, who know us. But from there it transformed into something where our psyche pushes us to voice our opinion about anything and everything. As soon as we hear a news, we feel an urge to express our opinion over it on social media. This was not our behaviour. We have been manipulated to be a subject of a bigger reward, recognition and punishment cycle. We post something, we wait for people (known and unknown) to react to it, we want to get rewarded with likes and shares and that becomes our dopamine stimulant. And this does not happen overnight, it may take days, months or years, depending on your usage. It just has to be progressive.
You stay hooked to your social media, and they keep making money, To keep you hooked, they will fill your feed based on your interest, people you like to interact with based on your history, relevant topics etc. Well, arguably not a bad business model. I would like to throw light on where I feel it goes wrong.
Let's finally, address the elephant in the room. Social media spaces have become arenas for cyberbullying. Harmless names such as trolling, roasting, etc. have been given to cyberbullying paired with adjectives like savage, lit, etc. said in a positive light to legitimize that. Such acts of cyberbullying bring on user engagement, followers, increasing your "Digital Valuation" or "Influence quotient". This quite naturally inspires others to do the same, and go a step further, because this is what they believe will bring them success, there is no line to it. The "Roasting" in its authentic version is a dialogue, where the participants make fun of each other for acts, lives, behaviour, they did, with mutual consent. It is not shaming, it is not demeaning, it is not abusive (abusive does not mean usage of profanity). Calling cyberbullying roasting, is like sucker-punching someone and calling it boxing. A similar version of it is trolling on social media, twitter specially. A swarm of such trollers, mostly anonymous, bully the user as per their convenience. Some star trollers or tweelebs may even have following in millions. Their reward system is getting boosted by their toxic habit. At the same time their audience is getting inspired to do the same, in order to achieve success.
Twitter recently took a positive step in this regard and has allowed the user to chose who may comment on their posts and who can not but that alone does not curb the one way cyber-bullying served as roasting.
The whole ecosystem that validates someone as successful, has the foundation of monetary benefits. Anyone can exploit your sentiments, build a following, become famous, become "successful" (validations like the verified profile, meeting celebrities, having meet and greet, getting invited to talk shows , get paid promtions, etc. ) in the digital world. And all of it without being creative or adding any value anywhere. Simply by spreading hatred or abuse or bullying. It has become that easy. The more toxic side to this is that such characters inspire millions of their followers to do the same.
Negativity spreads very easily, you can create a hate video on anything, a section of society, a country, a policy, a leader even an app, without any specific matter but just abusing it, and still get views in thousands, because negative sentiment goes far and is more persistent than a positive one.
I would like to bring the focus to one such digital celebrity, all he did was sit in his car, record a video with a selfie camera, exploits the already exploited patriotic sentiments, begins with a jai hind, to validate himself as a good person, and what follows is a series of venomous hatred and slurs for people he disagree with. 10 years ago if someone said Jai Hind followed by Ma ki C*** , that person would have been called out everywhere and asked to apologise. What we see today, is glorification of such acts, invitation to a national tv reality show, because the TV guys know how get audience, awards and rewards. No content created, just abuses and hatred. But he rises to "success" in the digital world.
Ask such a creator to make something original of his own, and he has nothing to give you. Because in the game of likes and shares and subscribes, such content is an easy ladder. Now if you go to youtube you will find a generation of "Roasters, People hating, threat issuing youtubers", all just striving to make a little money and be successful and they are unaware of any kind of ethics, because their heroes are too. Again, Roasting is done consensually, without demeaning or bullying.
Another side of social media changing the way we are, is it peer pressuring many aspiring to be social media stars into being something they are not. Showcasing glittery life like the ones of "who have made it". The pursuit of success has become so ruling that in the US young kids are under debt to showcase their cars, jewelleries, sneakers and what not. Instagram influencers, are not able to make it without showing their skin and being sexually appealing. A talented artist or sportswomen might have followers in some thousand, even though she is providing good entertainment value, but a fake page posting just breasts and bottoms of women with faces cropped out might have followers in millions, and mind you that account is not even a real person. And we as a society then have the guts to say, we should not objectity women.
According to a survey conducted by a lingerie brand between 1992 and 2013, the average bra size in the U.S. has increased from a 34B to a 34DD, and now just seven years later, the average has shot up to a DDD — that’s the largest compared to any of the other countries studied. Where are we heading ?
Sure sex sells, thats one way of marketing when you run out of ideas, but marketing sexually your self, is seriously a big issue.
After that I would like to re-adress how this whole online social media world is impacting our behaviour. The social media platforms did their job by keeping you hooked by easing out your feed, but now what you make of it is up to you. People are induldging in arguments with strangers, those not indulging are spending hours reading others arguments. Then people with more time argue over the internet with a similar stranger who has a difference in opinion with them. People with lesser time will indulge in debates with their acquaintances who disagree with them. Either way, we become more negative, more hateful, more intolerant and hostile toward disagreement. Arguments among friends for causes as silly as whose app preference is better, has become a common spectacle.
The human tendency to say something in person vs through a medium varies by a huge margin. When the person we are addressing is in front of our eyes, we tend to value them more, quite similar to paying in cash or paying online/card, when we don't see the money we tend to value it lesser. Similarly when we are arguing with someone in person, we tend to be more human, more sympathetic, more tolerant towards them. We judge how much we value them, is it ok to let the debate win and lose the person. If it is a stranger we wont argue with them because it is ridiculous and simply not worth our time, also it is not very civil of us to argue with a stranger. But as soon as we limit our debates to our phones and laptops, we turn more hostile, because we are not able to clearly judge the value of the person we are arguing with in our mind and we continue on our journey to become a more toxic person online. We do not give a damn about how sensitive the one on the the other end might be. What has forged their thoughts that there is a disagreement between you two. Is it a self interest or a personal trauma. We never care for all this. We don't have time for all that, We just want to impose our say, thats the whole point of internet arguments. We have become ideological warriors and that is the mother of extreme ideologies. We become harsher everyday.
Blame it all on our human minds, whatever we are becoming, the heroes we have chosen, how we fall into the trap of negativity more easily, how we learn to hate more easily than to love, how we let our sentiments be exploited, How we tend to click on a picture with a sexually appealing model than to someone doing something that requires talent. We can blame it all on our human minds and continue these people manipulate us further, exploit us further, spoil us further for their monetary benefits.
Or
We can chose to realise that we are at a very important juncture of human evolution where we set precedent for how the future generations are going to be in their nature, whom will they idiolize, what will they aspire to become and what society will they make up.
Our thoughts today shape our actions of tomorrow. We live in a society where an african american man needs to be displayed getting brutally killed on video for making people say Black Lives Matter. We live in a society where a person has to committ suicide to make people realise that mental health is a serious issue, and they love their friends and they are available for them.
Hope of being more human remains to be more sympathetic, more caring and more affectionate.
