For years since submitting my undergrad senior thesis to my Advisor’s box, I felt temporarily accomplished with my discoveries and claims about social media impact on activism.
Algorithms are what run the (internet) world, public online websites (Facebook, Twitter, SnapChat), and increasingly, society. When websites serve corporate interests, content is catered towards an objective: make consumers buy more, or so this is what I thought, almost naively. Provide free social media, entertainment, etc, give up privacy and let websites gather data on your online activity, down to what you like, search, and where you pause your routine scrolling. But there has to be more… the questions remained for years to come.
I knew that I was going to return to this topic, which I did through reading, conversations with friends, rants to my students or die hard capitalists, or vocally reflecting on my learnings. The times are changing, algorithms and digital microcosms have now shown us ever more (election, shopping recommendations) the importance of understanding how the online world contributes, impacts, and understands who we are as a human psyche.
My personal interest has been the efficiency of social movements online, and comparing them to traditional activism such as marches, policy, and education (not necessarily institutional). Can the internet help us spread a message when it is increasingly infiltrated with loads of information, and cut down, fed to pieces based on the historical activity of each individual user?
“Everybody Lies” further sparks my curiosity
I failed the only computer science class I took in college, but my curiosity for its impact on the world only grew. One of the popular topics in the class was the following : Is AI going to take over the world? Many folks may picture the robot vs. human a physical war, but even as governments now, we already fight a data war. Russia hacking the US election, fake news, twitter bots, you name it. The weapon is now the keyboard. The code.
We can arguably say that data is only stronger, so can we use this to make the world better? Can we use this for movements that push humanity in the right direction? What is the right direction when data scientists already zoom in on small subsets of data?
The data seems to be as diverse as the humans contributing to it through their everyday online activity. As the author that catalyzed my action on this writing, Seth Stephens-Davidowitz states in his book, “Big Data does not eliminate the need for all the other ways humans have developed over the millennia to understand the world. They complement each other.” There is so much to observe on the social impact, there is so much that can be broken down in different shapes and sizes, that we are showered with not challenges, but opportunities for making progress.
We have the opportunity to understand enough to impact society efficiently. As I always argue, efficiently does not mean online only. For social impact to happen, there needs to be action offline.
Let me step back for a bit. Consumerism is increasingly online: purchases, advertisements, and interactions (reviews, customer service, etc). This helps companies because the end goal is achieved: consumption increases when you reach your intended audience in their world online.
Can the same be said about civic progress, social progress? Is moving more action to the online realm help achieve the same goals as private companies at the same rate? A couple factors to consider : what is measurable, what is online and what isn’t? Can we observe comments of what people say? This is difficult to determine.
Activist websites can rile up viewers and invite a lot of passionate comments, no doubt, but does it transfer to the real world? Where is socializing happening most? A question we can ask in determining social progress is if we should address social progress congruently to where it is happening.
Is consumerism social? How do we break it down?
Breaking down what we gather off of data science and manage a way to categorize our findings into these categories, their causes or origins, and presence on and offline can help us create more practical solutions.
I will be reading other books and note observations to find the missing puzzle pieces to the map of social progress. Follow me on this collaborative journey.
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