Recently I was evaluating research titled “Social Media Echo Chamber” published in March 2021 about social media’s impact on society at large. The research has been conducted by five eminent Italian academicians; Matteo Cinelli, Gianmarco De Francisci Morales, Alessandro Galeazzi, Walter Quattrociocchi, and Michele Starnini.
The research deals with mechanisms social media platforms use to play with the human cognitive system, psychology, and how propaganda experts use them to generate narratives by creating echo chambers and how they create groups having nothing common in them except the emotional state of mind.
Humankind evolves organically which includes socialization and co-existence. After decades of observation humanists coined the relevant term of “mankind being a social animal”. The primitive socialization and living in groups that transform themselves into societies over the period was a cognitive phenomenon solely based on basic human survival by keeping themselves safe from hunger and fear, and also for the purpose of reproduction. Individuals with shared goals on behalf of their collective consciousness formed social groups. Among those groups, each member shares his/her collective wisdom and participates with emotional relevance. The emotional relevance is not necessarily dominated by a single emotion, on the contrary there is a mixture and a combination of human emotions. Human emotions are key factors to set societal norms and higher-order long-lasting agendas for the greater good.
However social media created inorganic social groups primarily based on uni-emotional priorities such as liking or disliking groups, based on a one-point agenda. All the members of one particular social media group do not share their complete set of emotions and do not co-exist in a physical space and time.
Algorithms working behind social media are converting humankind into a species that has no oral wisdom of generations nor they can relate to their own collective wisdom. They feel misfits and detached from their physical space as they no longer live there. This artificial phenomenon is a threat to human survival, human beings without having a commitment to their own anthropology, solely relying, and nurturing themselves on a provided alien virtual society can even cease to exist. It could sound like an overstatement at the moment, but evolution theory can provide all the answers.
We understand that social media radically changed the mechanism by which we access information and form our opinions.
Which again questions the basic idea of informed opinion; opinions lead to decision-making, judging and evaluation. Social media is involving artificial intelligence to craft opinions through different manipulations, regardless of the fact that every social media user is a lab rat and living in a controlled and contrived environment, totally detached from his/her reality.
Platforms originally designed for user entertainment are being used to change the way information is spread. Indeed, feed algorithms mediate and influence content promotion accounting for users’ preferences and attitudes. Such a paradigm shift has affected the construction of social perceptions and the framing of narratives; it may influence policy-making, political communication, and the evolution of public debate, especially on polarizing topics. Indeed, users online tend to prefer information adhering to their worldviews, ignore dissenting information, and form polarized groups around shared narratives. Furthermore, when polarization is high, misinformation quickly proliferates. Detached facts, no matter how real they are, can never suffix the firsthand information gathered by sense perception.
Some of us can say that the accuracy of the information might be used as a determinant for information spreading patterns. However, selective exposure dominates content consumption on social media, and different platforms may trigger very different dynamics. These dynamics could be contrary to the social, cultural, and geographical normativity of the user.
While playing with the human mind, social media platforms are manipulating with homophilic patterns and creating a society that is vulnerable to emotions and mood swings, generating a chaotic society where the human brain is directly under the influence 24/7 by unseen manipulators and unknown enemies. This networking is creating like-minded groups where humans have no information about each other but work for the same cause. This situation has categorically broken conventional rules of Social Grouping. Social media limits the exposure to diverse perspectives and favours the formation of groups of like-minded users framing and reinforcing a shared narrative, that is, echo chambers.
According to group polarization theory, an echo chamber can act as a mechanism to reinforce an existing opinion within a group and, as a result, move the entire group toward more extreme positions.
The traditional theories confirm that echo chambers affect human tendencies, such as selective exposure, contagion, and group polarization. Different platforms offer different interaction paradigms to users, ranging from retweets and mentions on Twitter to likes and comments in groups on Facebook, thus triggering very different social dynamics.
When an echo chamber is created with low moderation and regulation on content then it can result in strangulation of Truth and spread of False, and this is what we are facing today.
The deterrence does not stop here if individuals having no shared collective knowledge get connected to each other forcefully such as they do not share place and even time in that particular space with each other, in that case, they become the source of hybrid culture with predominant non-commonalities, they not only misunderstand but also misrepresent the reality. By knowing others and living side by side is a buffer zone for the echo chamber effect. However social media exempt the necessity of group formation on shared commitment and shared goals which has made human arguments, decisions, and the beliefs they are supposed to base on, mere noises. Moreover, this noise has no substance and clarity plus a lack of direction for the sake of what next.
Inorganic controlled groups and societal formations are creating an information influx that isan unnecessary cognitive load, irrelevant to existing realities of users.
Algorithms working behind social media are converting humankind into a species that has no oral wisdom of generations nor they can relate to their own collective wisdom. They feel misfits and detached from their physical space as they no longer live there. This artificial phenomenon is a threat to human survival, human beings without having a commitment to their own anthropology, solely relying, and nurturing themselves on a provided alien virtual society can even cease to exist. It could sound like an overstatement at the moment, but evolution theory can provide all the answers.
