Public Opinion Interview With Ryan Gordon
For my blog this week, I decided to interview a friend of mine to create what I like to call a public opinion post. I sat down with my buddy the other day to ask him a very simple, yet very broad question, “How do you think social media has impacted our society?” and I feel I picked the right person because he did end up having a few things to say.
One of the first things that he began to talk about was the repetitive nature of the platforms and how even though you will never be fed the same post more than two or three times, the app tends to give users the same type of content over and over again, which is why it does such a good job keeping it’s users invested in videos day after day, when they can be very similar every time. In connection to it’s repetitiveness, he made an emphasis in his points that so many people who watch these reels have been desensitized, or as he likes to put it, “brain numbed” by the repetitive content that is fed to them every day and gives them the dopamine rush that they are addicted to. Similar to the repetitiveness, it creates very short attention spans in young people who use these platforms. In the last two decades, the average attention span has draped from 12 seconds to 8.5 seconds, according to Golden Step Statistics in November, 2023. This has a wider spread impact than some of us may think. In school, in jobs, and even in our relationships, people have built somewhat of a disconnect with each other and a closer connection to our phones.
The other thing that Ryan told me that he has grown to have a real issue with throughout the development of social media is the vast amount of false information that many people read and just assume to be real. When I was growing up, I was taught about misinformation online and disinformation (while I didn’t really know the distinction until this semester) but nonetheless, there was an emphasis on fact checking and making sure the information that I was reading was taken with a grain of salt. I feel that nowadays, the younger generation hasn’t been told this same information. An example Ryan gave me of how this has impacted him was through the death of Kobe Bryant. When he first saw the news in a TMZ post, it took him to have to do more research before he really believed it because he thought it wasn’t real at first, but unfortunately it was. The information era has, within itself, paved a way for a disinformation age which doesn’t show many signs of stopping anytime soon.
