Opinions

On my Facebook, I stated that [one of] my favorite quote is:

Opinions are like arseholes, everybody has one.

I can’t remember where I first came across this, but I think I decided on this assertion in 2009. It was more of a reminder that, as an individual, it’s important for me to build a personal idea of who I am first, before giving in to who others say I am. This has helped me develop a strong valuation for myself, irrespective of what position I might find myself at any particular time.

However, over the years I’ve come to realize how very wrong the second part of this quote is. You see, many people don’t actually have an opinion. While lots of people think they do, what they actually have is herd mentality.

It was easy to build herd mentality via TV in the past, by brainwashing people with popular media propaganda and hogwash. With that method, an independent observer can tell that someone is being initiated into the herd.

Contrary to popular ideas, it’s even a lot easier now with decentralized media; but it takes a different dimension and is harder to spot. The availability of social media has made it closer to home than ever before, but with a twist: people unknowingly contribute to their own initiation into the herd.

Many people think that they have independent opinions, just because they have access to the same media platform as The President of the United State of America, in exactly the same way he has access to it. Lol.

Below are common herd mentality behaviours exhibited by social media users:

• Twitter fights, with the same set of people in a clique always rising up in defense of each other.
• Preferential treatment and higher attention [in terms of comments, likes, etc] giving to a frequent posters in a Facebook group, than given to some newbie who says exactly the same thing.
• Blog comments where the first comment sways subsequent responses to a particular direction.
• Etc, etc…

Biggest effect of this I’ve observed so far is that we subconsciously build an echo-chamber, which reinforces our [mostly negative] biases. Hence locking us up in a cycle that eventually becomes very tough to break.

I think the best way to fight this is by consciously withdrawing from groups & cliques which we’ve formed on social media, and reassessing the values/process from which we’ve derived validation within these groups & cliques.