Because Facebook was making me dumb.
After much deliberation, I deactivated my account. I must file a caveat here. I’m not a Neo-Luddite; you know, the kind who dislikes technology. I’m the kind most people call a geek. So why quit Facebook?
A little over two years ago, I read a lovely book, Truth, Beauty and Goodness Reframed by Howard Gardner, an American developmental psychologist at Harvard University. The book compelled me to write him a note and ask for an interaction. The man was gracious and offered me his time. Several interactions over email and some face time on one of his visits to India later, I published a piece in Forbes India, where I used to work until very recently.
Gardner’s hypothesis is this. The world we live in is one where it is ridiculously simple to find people who agree with you. But there is a downside to that. Because everybody around seems to agree with you, prejudices that exist in your mind, are reinforced.
As theories go, I thought it compelling. But the implications weren’t evident to me, until very recently when I started to examine my media consumption habits, Facebook included.
Each time I checked my Facebook feed I thought I could see a pattern. On the one hand, I had in excess of 500 “friends” and subscribed to at least a dozen groups. On the other hand, my feed was populated by posts from “friends” that ran into just double digits.
Eventually, I realised this monotony in feeds that populated my timeline was because all of it originated from two kinds of people. Those whose posts I hit the most number of “likes” on; and those who frequently hit “like” on my posts. Other “friends” on my network were invisible entities—unless I chose to actively seek their timelines out. The more I thought of it, the more I was convinced this is a problem. What I “like” is inevitably what I agree with. What about those I disagree with, or whose posts I don’t hit a “like” on? Why should they be invisible?
Interestingly enough, the numbers of people whose feeds I could see also ties in with the Dunbar Number. First proposed by British anthropologist Robin Dunbar, he argued, a human being could on average maintain 150 meaningful relationships. By “meaningful” he meant, if all of these people were in the same room, everybody would be comfortable. Implicit to comfort is that everybody shares more or less similar worldviews.
My reading’s suggests social media architects of the kind who work at Facebook deploy this idea in their algorithms to limit interactions and visible ideas to the boundaries imposed by this number. Else, their product may seem chaotic to most humans. While the architects may be right in deploying the wisdom Dunbar’s Number contains, I am convinced these interactions in the digital world contain a fatal flaw.
In the offline world, I live in a space different from the one my elders do, or the one my sibling does. My friends come from backgrounds dramatically different from mine.
That is why when my folks chide me for my lack of spiritual beliefs; my sibling disagrees with me on what constitutes the good life; and my friends vehemently argue over political ideology, there is no acrimony—at best, animated conversations. I can’t hit a “like” button here or “unfriend” them. By the very nature of my relationships, my biases aren’t confirmed. Instead, they are challenged, unlike Facebook, which provides me comfort that comes with homogeneity.
That said Facebook is only a metaphor for a larger problem that terrifies me. Allow me to put that into context.
I recently took to drinking green tea because I was told it is good. To understand why, I punched “Is green tea good for me” into Google. Practically every answer the engine threw up pointed me to resources that argued why it is indeed good.
As a little experiment, I typed “Is green tea bad for me”. The numbers of arguments on why it may not be so good after all, were as many as why it is good.
The answers I was looking for were dependent on the bias built into my question. The algorithms that power the searches were feeding my biases.
To understand what happens if I eliminate the implicit bias in my question, I typed “green tea” into the search bar. This time around, the results were mixed. Some pointed to why it is good and others to why it is bad.
This is where my problem really is. We live in times where the potential to find ways that amplify our biases is unprecedented.
Most of us carry tablets, smartphones, and every kind of always-on device. Every media company, whether established or in start up mode, has latched on to the ubiquity of these devices. That explains the explosion of applications, which offer “personalised news feeds”, the “communities” they seek to build, and “relationships” they hope to forge on their platforms. This includes RSS feeds, bloggers you follow, Twitter, Flipboard, Zite, Storify, and everything else you can think of.
The ability to “personalise” allows you choose filters of all kinds: the media outfits you want to patronise, subjects that interest you, writers and opinion makers you like. You get what you like. Nothing more, nothing less!
This explosion in personalisation is killing diversity and making us dumber.
To draw yet another parallel, think food. Once upon a time, food was at a premium. Human ingenuity took over and agriculture was industrialised. Scarcity gave way to abundance and foraging became a thing of the past. Fast food culture took root. This culture though came with an underside. Humans became sedentary, turned corpulent and acquired lifestyle diseases. To combat these diseases, we are now compelled to make informed choices on the food we consume and proactively avoid sedentary lifestyles.
If this analogy is extrapolated into our world, Clay Johnson’s advice in the The Information Diet resonates loud. “Consume deliberately. Take in information over affirmation.”
In our own interests, therefore, it is incumbent to deliberately decide what information to consume, what communities to be part of, and what relationships to nurture.
The alternative is: Be dumb, stay dumb.
This post was first published by K RamKumar, ED at ICICI Bank on his personal website www.otherview.in