Break Free of your Bigot Bubble
Notes on Denial, Cancel Culture and Loss in our Digital Lives
The age of the algorithm is here. They are all around us, invisible to the average user, directing our digital movements in decisive ways. Right from our Uber rides to the ‘choice’ of books on Amazon, algorithms steer us online. They are also collecting us, in groups and as individuals, to feed us what we wish to consume in all forms. Data, information, Netflix movies and cat videos: your digital platter of options is curated by an algorithm. In short, they are closer to you than they appear.
Life in a Bubble
But most important is social media. In 2010, Eli Parasir coined the term ‘filter bubble’ to warn us of intellectual isolation resulting from user data-fuelled recommendations and filtered content that includes friends, news and information on social networking websites.
Algorithms pick our content, the people we are likely to connect with and the pants we’d most probably end up buying. This creates a sense of comfort in our minds where ideas, people and reality fit neatly with ideologies, personal beliefs, and convictions we hold. As we live our lives through these interactions, our exposure to alternate views or opinions shrinks.
“Technology such as social media…has turned out to be more of a problem than I, or many others, would have expected”, said Bill Gates in 2017 as he spoke to Quartz. We are all in our suitable bubbles. Put in place by the machine and our patterns of behaviours. We settle in, cozily.
The Psychology of Denial
As great as self-selection may be, we know from studies in human psychology that humans are hardwired to dismiss facts that do not correspond with their worldview. In his book “The Truth About Denial,” Adrian Bardon discusses that denial (such as that of climate change, for example) does not stem from ignorance, but from ideological persuasion. This very human tendency applies to all kinds of facts about the physical world, economic history, and current events.
Personalized information restricts us from getting the complete picture on anything, paving the way for opinions and people to be polarised and ascription to more definitive theories about the world and our place in it. While this provides us mental comfort, it drastically reduces space and tolerance for anything else that does not correspond to our views.
Welcome to Cancel Culture
But there is a much bigger crisis we are dealing with in our everyday lives. We all feel it beneath the surface. At some point, we come in contact with something outside our bubble. Or worse, someone from a different bubble. The bubble effect makes us less receptive, less inclined to hear, more dismissive.
Don’t we do it on social media? I don’t want to hear it! We say. His view is absolutely wrong! People who do not agree to X can please show themselves out of my friend list! Welcome to cancel culture.
Our way of addressing a clash of opinions is to walk past it. Or we explode, bitter and loud. We constantly create the other side that does not understand, they don’t know the reality. They are bigots, zealots, mislead, uninformed, almost evil.
As organic reach of information is rendered impossible on social media, mediation on a social network that pleases, traps and fixates a user ensure they’d never want to leave. And we become ever less tolerant, less diverse in our thought and politically bound in our social circles.
When Bubbles Crack
The bubbles do not only pop, they crack. It is a mental breaking of a glass shield of comfort. Most interactions are stories of loss. We lose respect for each other, we lose our heads and patience, we lose the ability to communicate across. We lose common grounds. There is lesser space for love, empathy, compassion. There is lesser space for questioning ourselves, with the false reinforcement of our own sense of right.
We lose friends. And what was supposed to connect us, tears us apart over issues that wouldn't affect our lives the least bit.
Be Less of a Bigot
To be less of bigots, we actively need to counterbalance what is served to us in our digital choices.
Let us seek friends across the spectrum and across interests, get information from non-conventional, non-polarised sources and seek to create fuller and better understandings of the world, in all its complexity, messiness, plurality and conflicts.
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