Impact of media on society: The two sides of the story.

When I ask a question to people about why they use social media? The common answer people give is that they have access to interact with their friends and other people. Its important to understand impact of media on society.

Technology bought remarkable changes in human life, they increased communication between people, they found organ donors, and they spread news faster and many more. This technology bought meaningful and positive changes to human life. Nevertheless, we are unaware of the flip side of the coin. Its important to understand impacts of media on the society.

Many people think that Facebook is just a place to see their friend or YouTube is just a source to see videos around the world. What we don’t realise is they are competing for our attention. How it is possible? Let us dig down deeper into it.

Large tech companies like Facebook, Google, Tiktok, Instagram, Pinterest have a business model to engage people onto their screens, to get people’s attention as much as possible and making money simultaneously within that span of time. All that we think is free on the internet is not in reality, they are paid by advertisers. The advertisers pay these companies in exchange to show their advertisement. 

If internet wasn’t a free source, the engagement rate towards it would drop down drastically. As we, don’t pay for the product we have become the product. Where the tech companies are the sellers, advertisers are the customers and the product being sold is our attention.

Every business thinks that if they place an advertisement they will reach their goal of success early. In order to reach the success in that particular business they need to have great prediction and lot of data.

The tech companies whose business model is to make sure the advertisers are successful in that business track your data, all the clicks you have made, all the likes, screen time, almost everything is tracked and monitored. They know everything thing about us whether we are lonely or happy. They even know our personality type.

There are lot of techies in Silicon Valley learnt to use all the knowledge about human psychology that persuades people. They build that into technology. This is persuasive technology, A design technique that can modify someone’s behaviour. Instagram has infinite scrolling feature that persuades people to keep on scrolling until they find something interesting.

Another feature very commonly used is refreshing. You pull your screen down and there will new feed on the top. So the infinite scrolling and refresh feature gives you a reward at a regular basis. When you scroll down there is something new on the screen that looks interesting for you which release dopamine into your body, to get back the dopamine hit you have to keep on scrolling. Now this action of pulling down the screen and scrolling becomes an unconscious habit. This in psychology is positive intermittent reinforcement.

We have surrounded our lives with perceived sense of perfection, we get short-term rewards of dopamine hit through likes, thumbs up, comment etc,. We get a fake popularity that we consider as real. These short-term rewards force us to fall into the loop to do something new to get that reward again. Technology is not only controlling our attention but technologies like social media have changed psychology of kid’s as well as teenagers; they have lost their self-worth through this fake reality. Today’s young generation is more anxious and more depressed.

Processing power has advanced quadrillion times since 1960s but our human brain has not evolved and fundamentally, it would never change. We all think the same that Artificial intelligence will be the destructor of humans in far future. What we need to understand is Artificial intelligence is running our world right now.

The big tech companies have tons and tons of computers stored in a massive room that runs all algorithms from simple task to complex task. However, Artificial intelligence isn’t the problem, it is just like a machine with a define task to do and it learns by performing different experiments to reach the task and gets slightly better every single day.

Famous basketball player Kyrie Irving believed that earth is flat, later when he apologized he blamed to YouTube’s rabbit hole. Basically Kyrie Irving fell into the trap of YouTube recommendation, YouTube’s A.I used recommendation feature to engage Kyrie onto his screen by displaying all the videos that were promoting the flat-earth conspiracy theory, its like the YouTube finds the nearest rabbit hole to dig down deeper and deeper.What we listen or watch on youtube or internet we believe it to be true such is the impact of media on society,

Finally, Kyrie was convinced that the earth is flat because all the videos he was watching sound true to him. When he apologized for believing that earth is flat, few student were interviewed saying “the round-earth people got Kyrie”. The algorithm is getting smarter exponentially today people are convinced by the flat earth theory tomorrow there would be new conspiracy theory that people will believe into.

There is lot of fake news spreading faster than real news; It has increased polarization among people, nations are dividing themselves. Internet has become as market place, a market place where human futures are being sold, a market place where you are just a zombie who look at the screen for a long time. This is undermining democracy, if this goes on for years we won’t survive.

People often say that technology has ruined the world but this isn’t true. It is simultaneous utopia and dystopia, you can call anyone from any corner of the world, and on the flipside, your calls could be tracked to use it against you.

Social media was built to spread love amongst people but the business model of different business. Also,their financial incentives have ruin the fabric of healthy society, and there is no financial reason for the tech companies to change their services. There is no law on the tech companies to regulate data and to use is ethically

We need to admit these bad outcomes of technology are because of our work. We can demand the tech companies to built this humanely and not like an attention extraction source. The very fabric of healthy society depends on getting off the corrosive business model. Its the need of time to use social media to make an impact of media in the society than to pull others down.

if we have built something we have a moral responsibility to change it and make it ethically possible. Impact of media on society is both positive and negative. Its our duty to use it wisely.