The early 2010s… The years when Web 2.0 applications spread to the masses and the new media revolution took place. With the widespread use…
The early 2010s… The years when Web 2.0 applications spread to the masses and the new media revolution took place. With the widespread use of social media platforms, we, as the advocates of the New Media concept, took to the stage and defended the revolution of the new age. Information would now be democratized. No one would have the power to prevent everyone from learning the truth…
Back then, algorithms that learned about us and our interests were a beautiful thing. It knew us, and it would only show us the content we were interested in, without showing us a lot of unnecessary content that would waste time. But little did we know that these algorithms would trap us in our own echo chambers. We will just start going around and around in a small circle. without knowing whether the information we read is real or not.
I remember deleting Zite and Flipboard, the reason I bought an iPad, just for this reason. The application, which selects news according to my interests every time I enter, trapped me in a small word cloud after a while, and when I felt that we started to get lost among the content optimized and manipulated for these algorithms, I switched to Google Reader and then Feedly, which dropped the news according to the order of arrival from the news sources I followed. But it was not possible to escape from these algorithms on the Twitter feed, Facebook wall and Instagram feed.
While this environment we call New Media brings users together for free, it has also become a mold that directs them and molds them into a shape. These platforms, which are dependent on advertising revenues for their survival, employ the world’s smartest minds to get people to click more ads, while on the other hand, they have become tools to psychologically affect their users, sometimes intentionally, sometimes unwittingly. Societies made up of users have been sociologically affected and the masses, detached from this reality and imprisoned in echo chambers, have begun to transform the politics, economy and business world of which they are a part.
Web 2.0, which started as the story of the democratization of the internet, has evolved into a medium where masses living in the post-truth age, disconnected from reality, live in the 2020s, and where accurate and real information can be obtained after passing through very deep filters. Advertising, more advertising, much more advertising. Although my aim is not to demoralize by drawing a dystopian picture, fallacies, which we can define as faulty reasoning at this point, have become the crown of our daily news and communication sources. Twitter sensitizations, dictionary beautifications, Baby Boomer Facebook adjustments, the reality we all live in has become what the screens in our hands show us. And the screens in our hands only showed our echo chambers.
My work life, shopping decisions, neighborhood choices, parties to vote for, people to marry were influenced by the way this virtual world manipulated our minds. As we got to know the human brain better, it became clear that we are not very rational creatures. Here we are in an age where those who can keep their minds clear in this not-so-bright environment, those who first measure and weigh the information according to their own values instead of consuming it immediately, win, while the remaining masses are captive to algorithms and fallacies with their own free will.