Does it turn out that social media is better at breaking things than at making things? Wael Ghonim who posted the FB page "We are all Khaled Said" and launched the Tahrir Square revolution speaks out. Here's an excerpt, but seriously, read the article. If you can't get into the NYT, pm me and I'll send it to you or just pop it up here.
- Here is what he concluded about social media today: “First, we don’t know how to deal with rumors. Rumors that confirm people’s biases are now believed and spread among millions of people.” Second, “We tend to only communicate with people that we agree with, and thanks to social media, we can mute, un-follow and block everybody else. Third, online discussions quickly descend into angry mobs. … It’s as if we forget that the people behind screens are actually real people and not just avatars.
“And fourth, it became really hard to change our opinions. Because of the speed and brevity of social media, we are forced to jump to conclusions and write sharp opinions in 140 characters about complex world affairs. And once we do that, it lives forever on the Internet.”
Fifth, and most crucial, he said, “today, our social media experiences are designed in a way that favors broadcasting over engagements, posts over discussions, shallow comments over deep conversations. … It’s as if we agreed that we are here to talk at each other instead of talking with each other.”
Just wanted to point this out: I checked this site out, definitely reminds me of Hubski.Ghonim has not given up. He and a few friends recently started a website, Parlio.com, to host intelligent, civil conversations about controversial and often heated issues, with the aim of narrowing gaps, not widening them. (I participated in a debate on Parlio and found it engaging and substantive.)
He has some very valid points, especially when it comes to rumors spreading and how the algorithms or we decide what to see. Since new year's events in cologne, germany is having problems with rumors about refugees. Even though it has been shown that the culprits behind the cologne events were mainly gangs of originally moroccan citizens that have been in Germany for a longer time. People are putting rumors in the world about refugees and those rumors spread faster than anyone could research their validity. People already believe the "news" that were originally just rumors. Because things are moving so fast, only a small fraction of people actually check the validity of the information that they got and the majority accepts it as a fact. Netto, those rumors are doing great damage with very little effort. I think social networks how they are right now are making us a very unstable society. We change our mind 5 times a day and lose focus on the bigger picture. The second issue is that algorithms like the one facebook uses mainly shows us things that we agree with already, putting us in a bubble of confirmation bias. The news feeds are not a representation of all the ideas of the people we are "friends" with. It is a cherry-picked news feed that confirms everything we already know, over and over while in another parallel facebook universe very different things are cooking, but we don't see them. I am worried about how social media is evolving. It is a tool that, currently, is easier to use for bad than for good.