Note: “!=” is used to mean “not equal to” in coding but feel free to read it as “does not equal” in this case.
Yesterday was Super Tuesday, and for my American friends who are not familiar with it, it’s a day when a handful of states have their primary elections for the candidates running for the presidential race. When you pull up your favorite social media platform and scroll through the feed, it’s probably extremely one-sided and filled with the name of one or two candidates. One might assume that the general population is probably on board with the opinions and views that you see filling your feed everyday leading up to the elections.
Well, the 2016 election was when I naively realized how wrong that thought is. It’s when I also began to become familiar with certain terms. One of which was “echo chamber”, a word which in this context refers to being on sites and communities where you say just your political opinions and they bounce off the walls and echo back to you. Essentially, you only hear what you’re saying. It’s when I also realized how easy it is to live “in a bubble”, which in this context refers to living in your own political “ecosystem”. I was never much of a politics person but the 2016 presidential election was the first presidential election I was eligible to vote in, so I thought I would do my due part of being a citizen and learn what was going on.
At the time the two main contenders for the seat of the President of the United States were Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. The “bubble” that I unconsciously found myself living in, due to the social media sites I was using, depicted Clinton as the candidate who would confidently secure that seat. Well, the results of the election obviously proved that wrong. As a user of those sites, I was surprised, but some of the citizens who invested a lot of time in their candidate only to see them lose were even more devastated. So why were they so shocked? See: title. This little article isn’t intended to go deep into the topic and won’t go into detail about the tampering with election results or fake news, both of which had a hand in influencing the results according to the top-government intelligence officials, but I do recommend anyone interested to do some research about it. But one of the main things that lead to so many people being shocked is living in a bubble and only frequenting echo chambers that reverberated their opinions and did not leave any room for opposing thoughts.
The Super Tuesday election results served as another reminder of how influential the internet can be on a person’s thoughts and opinions. This time I was well aware of how biased certain sites can be and I was not surprised when the results showed something contrary to what the multitude of users thought (and the articles they brought to the top of the feed). Again, this article is NOT intended to share my political opinions and beliefs. It’s only to share my observations and give a friendly reminder to people that you shouldn’t allow sites that have algorithms in place to show you what they think you want to see – or, sites that allow users to vote up certain submissions and vote down others – to influence you and change your perception of the real world.
I know a lot of people already know about this, so it might be redundant or useless reading this, but if it helps at least one person realize the content they see online is not reflective of the real world and opinions held by the majority of people, I’ll be happy. This will save you from a lot of surprise or shock and make you be much more careful the next time you use certain sites.
Journey To Japan 