Toffy’s Divide Themes: 3 — Conformism and Controlled Mass Media
In an era where dialogue is a lost art, social media conformism, mimicry, and mis-information continues to expand at scale.
The fact that, within seconds, we can see what’s going on in someone’s life thousands of kilometers (miles) away and in the next minute, you can follow what’s happening in another person’s life thousands of kilometers (miles) in the other direction is truly amazing.
The internet and the devices that connect us to it, have truly transformed our world of 7 billion people into a “small” global village.
It’s also fascinating to see how we are all glued to these devices across the globe. In the car, in the bus, in a meeting, walking down the streets, people have their eyes fixated on their devices — staying connected to their virtual global village.
Making connections. Sharing content.
But on the other side of these devices are the media and technology companies. Their goal is to keep people glued to the screens, on their platform — monitoring your interactions and building predictive models around your behavior.
The power of these companies on our behavior can be mind-boggling.
We trade our privacy for human connections on these platforms but sometimes what we really get are enticing product placements, manipulated electorates, and polarized dialogue — all in an alluring package of endless scrolling on our “fit-in-the-pocket” shiny devices.
The life, right?
Manufacturing Consent
But when these corporations are driven by profits and efficiently distribute your attention to the highest and most suitable bidder, they have to start putting us into codified groups — suitable demographics — to make the sale of your attention more focused.
This grouping creates echo chambers where we begin to conform to our group’s mainstream thinking. We lose the art of critical thought and dialogue when we focus on just parroting what everyone is saying to remain socially accepted. No one really wants to be ostracized from the group.
The media companies have a strong influence on us and can dictate what our group’s mainstream narrative is.
Noam Chomsky explained this in his book MANUFACTURING CONSENT, with the 5-filter propaganda model that private media use to consolidate their power.
The goal of media companies has always been to capture the limited resources we all have — attention — and sell that attention to the highest bidder.
Producing and getting your consent delivered to you.
Any changes?
Now we are in an era where content creation has been democratized. Anyone with a phone and internet service can create and share content.
But now it’s the providers of the infrastructure that allows the distribution of the content (the technology companies with their algorithms) that have the power, picking and choosing what you see in your feed.
I’m not a person that embraced content-sharing at first. I thought it was a little too intrusive. I really enjoyed keeping my private life–private.
But when I realized that sharing content as myself (not my company page) was an important part of not only building my business but also letting people know the other interesting projects I work on, that’s when I started looking for authentic avenues to spread the word.
I started posting consistently on LinkedIn and I did see some results.
I started learning what worked and what didn’t. When a post had limited reactions, I’d wonder what went wrong and think of ways to tweak it for the next post.
I was hopeful after certain posts. Not so hopeful after numerous posts.
After a few years of doing this, I realized something. I had fallen for a fallacy “that I was interacting directly with my connections.”
What I had forgotten is that there was a big player between me and my connections (friends) and that player was also the one that provided us all the access.
Yes, LinkedIn.
AND the algorithm behind it that decides what gets boosted, suppressed, and shared.
For instance, if you ‘reshare’ a post on LinkedIn it hardly gets any buzz. Why should it? The algorithm has already boosted the original post, why should it care about your reshare?
Or if you include a link in your post, LinkedIn doesn’t boost that much because that’s a post that will get people to click away from LinkedIn.
Social media jail
Now it’s the large technology companies that are in control of the media, learning our every preference–what we share, like, dislike, scroll past.
LinkedIn for instance knows your LinkedIn behavior better than you know your LinkedIn behavior.
Even worse, you don’t own any of the content. I learned that the hard way when my profile was restricted (and I was put in LinkedIn jail for 3 days).
My profile was “disappeared.” My digital footprint? Wiped away.
After years of thinking I was building a direct relationship with an audience. I was reminded that the company owned all the content, the contacts, and the connections.
My DMs, posts, friend list. Gone at a click of a button.
This happened a few weeks before launching TOFFY’S DIVIDE. I panicked. How am I going to let people know that the book is published? All the effort of building a community — now gone.
After a few days of verification with LinkedIn support (which was actually quite responsive), my profile was resurfaced. Back again to engage. Like nothing ever happened.
This was an eye-opening and personal experience.
It shows how far our reliance on these companies can be detrimental to staying connected to our community.
These organizations have the same power to censor what they don't like, suppress views, ban any thing that doesn’t ‘conform’.
Conformism in Toffy’s Divide
Now imagine a world where these technology companies, the media distributors, the algorithm empowerers get consolidated into a few companies or maybe only one player.
Will they be focused on the goals of bringing people together and building community or on the goals of their company which is to make profit? 🤔
In Toffy’s Divide, J Enterprise is the one singular company in charge of everything in the highly-divided city. They create, distribute, and enforce the narrative and the story that’s being told.
You either fit in or end up matching to the tune of a different drum that can find you rendered ‘useless.’ Floating around, hopeless, in a world where you are constantly bombarded with content that it’s hard to tell a waking dream from reality.
Can the conformism seen in the fictional world of J City happen in our world today?
Are we doomed towards a future of controlled media and loss of individuality?
Are we?
We can be hopeful though that individuals will question the conformity.
That people will spend more time seeking self awareness to interact with the world instead of us just following the trends.
That diverse dialogue will be tolerated.
That there will be people in the world, regardless of the pressure to conform, who wouldn’t mind sticking out and going against the grain.
Not solely for the purpose of rebellion but to give people a moment of pause while putting a mirror up, saying “hey everyone, look at what’s happening? Do you think it’s all good?”
Everyone should cultivate their own level of self awareness to get their own answer — through constantly questioning and being curious.
These are the hopes we have for the Toffy’s Domes NFT Project.
Be a part of the storytelling movement. Get your own Toffy’s Domes Token here!
