by Social Media was initially created with good intentions. I don’t think that creators of social media websites could have ever imagined that we would end up here where we are today. Today we are at a stage that we are flirting with a disaster ready to happen anytime. We are cheerfully charging towards a calamity and its like a person falling from the roof of a tall building and is cheerfully saying to himself, so far as good as he crosses each floor. The new four horsemen of apocalypse are Artificial Intelligence, Bots and Social Media.
The reason I say we are falling or an apocalypse is coming because these new technologies are manipulating us like puppets. They are changing the way we think and interacting with the world. The society is more polarized than ever. The biggest issue is that any one can buy advertisements on social media and ask them to change the way people are thinking. Leaders can push conspiracies to people who are susceptible to conspiracy theories. Once there are few people believing conspiracies, they spread to others which creates social unrest and riots.
Further, people are very susceptible to stories on internet which are popular and trending. Advertisers can also invest in bots which like their pages and stories making them popular and trending. Once a story is popular or trending it gets attention of a lot of users and people believe it just because its popular. Once we believe a false popular story we act differently than otherwise. You see, we are getting reduced to a raw material for the social media companies. Our attention is the product, they want you to keep looking at their websites and apps. They’ll keep feeding you information and advertisements. They’ll keep learning your patterns like how much time you started at an image and what you read, when you read etc. They change our behavior by showing things we would click and those clicks make money as advertisers pay for them.
I also believe that a lot of people know all of the above or at-least some part of it. The important question is: What are you going to do about it ? The information which you read, watch or listen is really important because human brain wants to learn and develop all the time. If you are going to feed it with garbage, then expect it start craving for more garbage and getting good at consuming and producing garbage .
However, if you start reading good books and start feeding your brain with verified knowledge you’ll actually become more and successful in life and grow beyond all these distractions. There are so many successful self made billionaires today look at Elon Musk, Bill Gates etc. They read a book in a week, you can follow https://www.gatesnotes.com/ where Mr Gates publishes every book he reads. You would be surprised to see that he reads about so many topics which on surface does not relate to Microsoft.
If you flip the coin on internet, you would realize that gathering good information is easier than ever. If you want to learn something about a technology say “how to take good pictures” you can simply go to youtube and search the same. There are thousands of tutorials available for free or a small fee. If you want to learn complex topics like Nanotechnology or Block Chain, all you need is your will and undivided attention, there is no shortage of good resources. Then, you can work as a freelancer and there are various platforms where you can find work and get paid.
All you need to do is just take a moment before consuming any information from internet and ask yourself, is it worth spending my time on it. You would be easily able to filter noise and distractions from your life. I truly believe that genius is in you.
