As we traverse the brave new world of politics and social media, I would like to raise the issue of how much we are conscious of the active influence of social media on our political awareness? By now we are most probably used to some friends or family members who like to post and share things about politics. Notice how we first react to such posts: we may cursorily read them through if they have won our precious attention, or we simply ignore them and continue scrolling until something else hit us. If we feel rational, we may decide to award such postings with a ‘like,’ or ‘love’ or ‘loathe’ (yes, the emoticons).
Take some fifty-something of such postings and most probably we would see trending posts from that special someone about that special issue we care about. Now, the problem is not that there is a lack of such posts or some passionate issues to care about – they are ever expanding. Rather, are we giving up some wider political perspectives regardless of our current political position, attitude, or leanings just because of our innocent clicks in the social media? We like to think that we are smart and acutely aware of the latest political developments. Who doesn’t? Hence our immediate click and comment reactions!
But have we ever considered that we can be outsmarted by the algorithm designed to anticipate and frame our political awareness? We like to think that we are smart and acutely aware of the latest political developments.
Who doesn’t? Hence our immediate click and comment reactions! But have we ever considered that we can be outsmarted by the algorithm designed to anticipate and frame our political awareness? It is like shouting in an echo chamber: others in the social media that we react to are ultimately the very form of our own political opinions expressed in different ways. Of course we can have many political things that we consider important, and which we care for on social media. Their numbers do not matter because they just determine the size of our thought bubble.
Their expandable and contractible borders have been set by the algorithm! Most of us are not computer programmers or mathematicians, but we still can find what we like somewhere in our newsfeed. Even if they do not appear immediately, we can scroll over and over until we find them. We need to suspect this kind of behaviour of desperately scrolling for issues that we are then urged to respond to with ‘like,’ or ‘love’ or ‘loathe’. For one, our action can reveal our political preference which, if unchecked, can be our unique form of political prejudice. We not only simplify the limited click options; we even solidify our existing political beliefs that are mediated only by the virtual algorithm instead of by a conscientious person. Who mediates our political awareness matters if we still think of politics as a meaningful social realm of value-making and problem-solving.
That is why we take the trouble to (literally) gather at public spaces to show support for or dissatisfaction about certain issues close to our hearts. When we do that, we attend to those issues in person. When there are a number of us who gather in our own persons, we know those issues are at least humanly real. People take trouble for that by spending their precious weekend or sitting through a scorching day or wade through traffic jams. Now compare that with our virtual presence in the social media with our hope of gaining something politically beneficial. With the continuous streams of data presented to us, we are prone to be overwhelmed by them.
Thus we ultimately cherry-pick only to create a hollow vision of our customized political vision, courtesy of the algorithm. No, we are not individuals when we want to “shout out” in a cyberspace. We are tracked, and everything that we type and post can be recorded, analysed and returned to us as our unique newsfeeds. We must be constantly aware of this lest we become overconfident about our eureka moments in social media.
