Meaningful Connections, Social Media and Algorithms
If you are like me, you thrive on making personal connections — deep meaningful exchanges of experience and vulnerability. There is a lot of fun in connecting to people who have similar interests or learning new things from people with a different perspective than you.
It has been quite magical growing up in a time where technology is accelerating and you go from dial-up, those keyboard-tv-cassette video games and chord phones to broadband, high end personal laptops and smart phones. Now the personal connections you can make are not physically limited your school, workplace or neighborhood.
At the same time modernization means we are increasingly isolated from human connection. People are usually moving around for work, finding an affordable place to live, good schools for their kids, and sadly more common now, due to instability. Whichever way, it is less common to have that niche where you grow up and grow old in one place where you know everyone around you and you easily connect.
With the physical access of our social networks decreasing and technology becoming a part of our biology, we end up on that endless scroll in the search for deep meaningful connections. About a decade ago, when I joined Facebook, it was this interesting new window of getting to know people, socialize and create all kinds of new relationships. It felt like a digital neighborhood that you can go to.
Slowly, social networks became more advanced, using algorithms to tip the scale and manage human interactions in the way that became commercially profitable. So you started seeing more content that related to your interests. The more likes you got, the more followers saw your content. At first this felt like great innovation — a way to keep you connected to the things that matter to you in an ever growing sea of content.
Now I wonder if it’s more as a curse than a blessing. Where everyone is walled into their own worlds and people experience less and less new opinions, new perspectives, reflective content. Many of us are lost in the tunnel of the algorithm chosen for you by Artificial Intelligence that has learned that if you like a specific video you will like another it picks out. This goes against our human nature to grow and change by seeing new things and having our experiences widened.
To ensure they are competitive, apps are increasingly using addictive tools to keep us scrolling and getting dopamine hits each time we hear that ‘ping’. Documentaries like The Social Dilemma show us clearly how the problematic aspects of social media can impact us as societies and lead to greater conflict. We block and unfollow at the slightest discomfort, leading us to have echo chambers of our own opinions and reinforcing our good and bad beliefs. I too am guilty of this as it is so comforting to stay where you are believing you are righteous.
Yet the goal of connecting is growing out of your old stance to an improved or expanded perspective. Even in disagreement, exercising the ability to understand the other persons point of view is a skill that we are using less and less. The algorithms also end up promoting less talk and more show. Deep insightful expressions are lost as the cute selfie or food photoshoot is ever more popular.
More frighteningly, this is magnified in politics where hate gets more popularity and views than expressions of love leading to extremism and the perpetuation of senseless crimes. On personal levels, trolls seem to thrive on such media where personal and public tear downs are viewed as live entertainment.
For those with mental health issues, I am no exception with anxiety, social media has the ability to truly impact how you perceive the world and yourself. For me, seeing endless negative or violent news heightened my anxiety while, as many of us, I admit less likes led to less confidence or feelings of low self worth. We slowly get conditioned to source our validation from the engagement or interest we drum up rather than from within us.
As young women and men, we are bombarded by continuous adoration or obsession with what's sexy, hot and superficial unattainable levels of beauty and coolness. How many selfies do we take to ‘get the perfect one’? How much do we focus on showing how we are having a good time and doing well in life?
While this may not be particularly a problem, it becomes an issue when it does not reflect the truth and makes us feel worse about ourselves afterwards. And we end up with distorted mirrors of reality rather than engaging with each other in ways that help us grow.
I used to fervently argue about the benefits of social media as it was where I gained many meaningful friendships and connection. Beyond making connections, I loved using it as a platform of advocacy for feminism. Yet as I grew older and wiser, the negatives slowly started outweighing the positives.
I joined those who place social media at arms length and had less new connections or deep conversations online. Unless you are a strong person with a healthy foundations of self love — which including myself, many of us are not quite there, the psychological problems social media creates can be quite a serious issue and it is unfortunately for many.
At the same time, I still believe technology can be a force for good. We also cannot give up on it as a source of connectivity and growth. So the question is how do use AI and Algorithms to make sure they contribute towards our growth instead of harming us.
Well, I believe, we need to make a continued and conscious effort to create communities and make meaningful connections. We need more engaging discussion that tolerate view points and explore new ideas. We also need to be equipped with tools on how to combat the negative effects social media has on our mindset.
In the past years, as I have explored learning online both for improving technical and mental skills, I have watched many amazing people who share supportive content and helped me through my journey. I have come to believe sharing meaningful content is unbelievably important.
You do not know how your content will impact someone’s life by them learning a skill from you or simply knowing that they are not alone in their feelings. So I believe the way we can connect is by continuing to share meaningful content, putting aside the equal importance of sharing fun memes.
