Is Social Media Controlling Our Minds?
(Based on a talk given to the Senior Citizens’ Forum, Kottayam)
Internet open to the public was born in 1983. There is an interesting paper written about it in 1998: “From Utopia to Dystopia” The Twin Faces of the Internet” by Debra Howcroft and Brian Fitzgerald. In the positive, Utopian Vision of the Internet, it was hoped that the convergence of computing and telecommunications would herald a new ‘information age’. Work and organizations would be transformed, education uplifted, democracies strengthened, and community life re-vitalised.
In contrast to this, there is a negative, Dystopian Vision of the Internet which believes that certain technologies “facilitate a social order that is harsh, destructive and miserable”. Online relationships are considered shallow, impersonal, and often hostile [Parks & Floyd 1996]. They argue that only an illusion of community can be created in cyberspace. Facebook illustrates this quite well.
“Knowing yourself” is considered a virtuous thing. Unfortunately, we are not very good at this. By contrast, others know us better. Our political orientation, the books we like, our food preferences and much more, can be computed from our exposure on social networks.
Using data from our footprints on the web, computers can reconstruct our personality. With this information…
