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TEDx Talks
Published: 2017-09-01
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vEoNp-xcyqc
uhhuh how we communicate with each other how we interact with other people has a profound impact on who we are when our identity and especially so in the digital age with social media is so prevalent I became aware of this connection between how we communicate and the identity quite accidentally while I was doing my PhD on TV live tweeting that is people tweeting about a TV
program while doing it I discovered the TV like feeders instead of wanting to communicate with a large community of people having different sorts of opinions about the TV program actually preferred a much smaller crowd and not just any crowd but a crowd of like minded people here is what one of my interviewees told me it's really nice talk to other people about it feel the same
way have same opinions and like the same things so like tweeters first search a peace people thinking like them and then started to follow them on Twitter so these people then %HESITATION because the if they could watch more easily actually relate first of all to their tweets and second of all because and maybe more importantly that they could %HESITATION these people were more prone to F.
follow them back and react to their tweets because the ultimate fun factor of light reading was and is a positive feedback that it provides two retweets send replies and likes I'm sure that all those of you who are using social media actively can relate this testimonial of another respondent on I think like quitting is the most fun when I get a lot of positive responses from
people so when writing my thesis three years ago about this social interaction when watching T. V. I thought that this like tweeters willingness to %HESITATION communicate primarily with like minded people was a trivial finding I gathered that they were simply replicating their online be offline behavior to the online because after all in the physical world we tend to communicate most often people that are close to
us our friends our relatives family members acquaintances that tend to have the same kinds of opinions and values than we do and so these are persons can be considered like went and there are many benefits in communicating with friends and so I thought that this M. communication that like critters were doing was just communication between friends and acquaintances taking place online when you're communicating with a
friend he or she knows what you are appreciating he or she is available when you need them and especially if you're looking for some sort of a permission your friends sort of filter away all the relevance now this can be a great thing if you're looking for a movie to watch or a phone to buy but to be a terrible thing prevents you from %HESITATION enlarging
your own worldview and this just like with this third interviewee among is what I fear is taking place on all social media platforms currently here's what she had to say I think that's the real interesting question for everybody in the social media am I just talking to myself in an echo are we just talking to ourselves in an echo I fear that weeks with social media
we have build around ourselves individual echo chambers echo chambers where similar kinds of opinions resonates and echo chambers where there is no room for opposing views these echo chambers they feed our vanity because they provide us positive feedback and validation for our opinions and the information in these echo chambers is all the more %HESITATION bed convincing because it tends to multiply itself through shares and retweets
the same information bounces back and forth from friend to friend from contact to contact and from person to person just like an echo does from the hard surfaces of an echo chamber so now this echo chamber phenomenon that I found not known interesting a trivial three years ago he emerges to me today that's something that is creating a fog between us had the opinions of people
that are outside of our immediate environment now I want to make the difference between this echo chamber effect that I'm describing and with the so called filter bubble but referred to algorithms used by virtually all and especially large websites these algorithms are actually prioritizing messages that we have that are similar to the ones that we have previously read or lights and thus they filter away from
our social media feeds our news feeds and even from our search results all the messages that we do not tend to read or like or pay attention to so for sure these filters and algorithms I think in this fog that I'm describing if we as social media users act like the participants in my study I prefer communicate only with like minded people cannot blame solely the
algorithms for this fall in fact I think that the deceptive ness of the cycle chamber phenomenon lyse precisely the fact that it is self inflicted and therefore hard to detect especially in the hectic life of our everyday %HESITATION environment but if we take a moment before we take a step back and think about our social media feeds I think we can hear the echo can you
hear the echo I definitely tan and I fear that this echo is dividing us on all sorts of occupational relocations on all sorts of religious beliefs and all sorts of political views or other interest areas and I would even say that it is partly to blame for the recent increase and populism intolerance and attacks against the democratic values of our society now if you hear the
echo you must be asking yourself what can we do about this I believe that we are all individually responsible for our own echo chamber and therefore I believe that also the solution lies it ourselves and that the tool that we need to fight this phenomenon just as ingrained if the human nature as his vanity the tool that I'm referring to water characteristic that I'm talking about
his curiosity our curiosity has led to humankind into some of its most significant accomplishments great things from it's covering vaccines to sending the man in the outer space or on the face of the moon curiosity lies deep in each of us and although it can take intrusive form it is generally seen as a positive force that drives us Scott and you so I simply thank but
this self satisfying social media environment where we're currently living it will not be able to satisfy our curiosity in the long run and that we will get bored with it I think but we're actually seeing signs of this boredom already now some people are closing their social media accounts and others are sharing tips on how to treat these algorithms by friending people they don't want to
be friends with or liking pages they don't actually like I don't think that we will get very far by pretending and lying like this first of all because it's against our nature and second of all because these algorithms I'm really good at detecting what we're really interested but maybe we could approach this different maybe it will take a little different angle to this although being aware
of these algorithms and filters and customization tools is important I think it'll be very hard for us change our communication patterns and tools so drastically that we would be able to void filtering once and for all but maybe we could make these algorithms work for us and maybe we could cultivate our curiosity in smaller parts small projects and then approach these projects as individual learning Japanese
actually this is the way that scientific research works for instance or journalist work for many artists work bait delegate to a subject they try to understand it and then they make their own interpretation of it and along the process what's interesting is that whether they're artists or journalist or researchers they end up changing themselves because they have learned something and that's important now these learning journeys
need not be any overly burdened some more ambitious all you need to do is to pick a topic I start googling get acquainted with people who are knowledgeable into Linda in this area of interest of yours are activate your networks offline and online and soon enough the social media algorithms would pickup missing you interest open doors and and help you along the way I have had
two such experiences myself recently the first one was socially motivated I run a cultural center cold table factory here in Helsinki and in the fall of two thousand and fifteen one beside me a refugee crisis was at its highest peak the cultural community of cable factory wanted to know how they could help the refugees and especially refugee artists and our office was in charge of the
project however I realized soon that my echo chamber was M. T. of refugees and people working with them and then we realized that actually no one in our team had ever met beside me refugee so we needed to reach out and through our networks we found this lady who worked as a volunteer for an organization helping and supporting refugees and then in collaboration with this organization
and we ended up organizing a joint arts exhibition by refugee artists and local artists and then cooking nights where refugees could meet members of our community it was these personally counters working together cooking together listening face to face their survival stories that really marked as forever I remember vividly talking to an elderly gentleman who told me that he had previously visited Finland many times as a
businessman and now he was here as a refugee and had spent months in a shelter waiting for an answer forties asylum application I couldn't do much for him other than listen to historian express my sympathy a curiosity steel paid off our world has changed well the other experience was more personal in nature although related to a pro professional projects cable factory we're building an extension to
a current facilities house dedicated to dance now my problem was that I don't have any background the dance I don't know anything about dance so I needed to get acquainted with this form of art from various angles well fortunately I had people around me who were much more knowledgeable in the field so I Fred did them on Facebook and I connected with them on linkedin and
started to follow them on Twitter and obviously also began to attend dance performances and then finally also signed up for a middle aged man contemporary dance class myself so there I was with seven other middle aged man doing some cool moves over a weekend well as you can see I'm still not an expert but I can assure you but I will never ever look at the
contemporary dance performs in the same way as I did before and now I have the utmost respect professional dancers you can actually express themselves through their body and sure enough dancing its various forms is now popping up regularly my social media feeds so on one side we can decide to build our identity upon the Vanity feeding echo chamber which is a comfortable spot to beat because
has this familiar thoughts and opinions but which is dangerous because it prevents us from understanding people outside of our immediate environment on the other side we have to ya city and we can decide to build our identity and curiosity it curiosities demanding because it's relentlessly putting in question our old ways of doing things in our existing theories and habits it's also joyful because it makes us
learn new things and meet new people and discover new ideas we are all responsible for our own echo chambers and we control our social networks whether we are teachers or students or researcher our artists journalists controllers social networks whether they're offline or online let's make sure that our communication cultivates our curiosity and that it will not give in the temptation of the echo curiosity may have
