How Social Media Is Shaping Our Society

Marshall Mc Luhan had proposed the radical idea that the type of medium a society uses determines the structure of the society itself and shapes the way people experience their world. Today, it is social media that is defining the way people experience their world. Digital media has fragmented ownership of media, shifting power away from big media conglomerates to an extent, and made the world into a ‘global village’. Ideally, exposure to diverse cultures should create societies that are more open and less ethnocentric. But how different are we as a society when it comes to being inclusive of marginal identities? Why are ‘post truth’ and ‘intolerance’, the buzz words of our times? And how can we best expose and explain why power continues to act in ways borrowed from the past?

Capitalism has been a dominant and celebrated characteristic of modern societies for the past century. Today, many believe that the more we acquire and spend, the better it is for the economy, and by extension is in the interest of the greater good. It also makes way for mass production, resulting in homogeneity of culture and of individual values and aspirations. One finds the same music, the same architecture and the same fashion in different parts of the world. And so, a majority of the population ends up having limited exposure to everything that is not mainstream, or is at the fringes. We end up being blind, but are also “blind to our own blindness”, as the psychologist Daniel Kahneman says. What we are unfamiliar with, we end up ignoring, dismissing or suppressing — especially when we have the convenience and power to do so. The fact that our society is ill-equipped to deal with those who are different, is problematic. Because there is no progress in ignoring significant parts of the society for the benefit of the “greater social good”.

The advent of the digital age brought about hope, because the world became available to those who wanted to seek it. The internet gave a platform to those who couldn’t previously make their space among powerful monopolistic forces hoarding media and their power to represent. Those at the fringes of the society claimed their space in corners of the virtual world; finding and forming their communities. There were home chefs, artists, musicians, journalists and opinion leaders finding their audience online, and the virtual world let cultures converge. This platform for ‘user generated content’ meant that people could now have a wider exposure to variety and diversity, opening up their worldview.

But of course, in a world where everything has to be monetized, virtual spaces are no exception. In the last few years, these spaces started being evaluated on the basis of capitalistic yardsticks. Venture capitalists started investing in start-ups and apps, with the hope of getting lucrative returns. Of course, they would only invest in ventures that already propagated the dominant ideology, that the audience is already primed for and hence offer a better ROI. Subaltern voices don’t have a ready market, and so they remain at the fringes.

Further, the science of Big Data was developed specifically in the quest to get people to consume more. Big Data enables personalization, and each individual is served products best suited to his/ her tastes. Social media apps and websites show people more of what they ‘like’ to keep them engaged. Download any news and entertainment app today, and the app will adapt in response to your tastes and preferences. While this may sound like an empowering phenomenon where the customer is king, what it does is again limit people’s exposure to anything they don’t want to see. It creates silos and makes sure that these different worlds don’t converge.

These silos also make sure that one’s opinions always find validation. Whatever one believes in, will only be reinforced by more articles, stories and data that support one’s point of view. Additionally, information is available in bite sized content, making it easy to think in black and white or left or right. There is hardly any middle ground or attention to nuance, resulting in divisiveness. The way we use internet today, is not expanding our horizons, but making us even blinder than we were. With all the information we have, we remain ignorant and intolerant. It is no wonder that several recent studies revealed that the youth today is more conservative than their ‘modern’ media habits suggest.

So if Mc Luhan were to be believed, then this era of intolerance is indeed shaped by social media and the way it functions today. And if it is to be our dominant media in the future, will the future continue to look so dreary? Perhaps the answer lies in looking at what kind of social media platforms will continue to thrive. There are, of course, certain characteristics that are common to any social media platform — such as the replacement of words with emoticons and pictures (which could either be the death of nuance or the invention of a new universal language). But there are also certain significant differences between platforms and the way they are used, and the dominant platform could arguably contribute the most to the way our society functions.

Facebook, being the oldest, currently enjoys the status of the dominant social platform. It has ‘sharing’ and ‘liking’ at its core, and its intelligent newsfeed filters out content that one may not agree with. It is designed to make people more opinionated. But the platforms that are growing exponentially, are messaging apps like WeChat and Snapchat, which might overtake Facebook in the future. These apps are not about making a statement to the world, but communicating with a private group of trusted friends. So while the world of Facebook thrives today, there is also a growing population of people who seem to not engage in opining and broadcasting. Would this solve for intolerance? Or would it give way to indifference, reinforcing the status quo?

The world is changing at lightning speed today. It is difficult to make predictions about the media landscape itself, let alone the effect that it will have on society. But it is true that social media is, and will continue changing the way our society functions. Of course a fundamental truth of any society at any given point in time is that there will be indifference or hostility towards those who are at the fringes of the society, or considered alien. While these qualities seem to have amplified in the last few years, resulting in divisive politics, we may find hope in the changing social media landscape. After all, having taken two steps back, one step forward is in order.