Perilous Side of Social Media – The Students' Herald

Do you think your future is private in this modern era of 21st century?
The concept about your data, how they obtain it, and what they do with it can be properly explained by the term Surveillance capitalism, artificial intelligence? and surveillance capitalism is an economic system centered on the commodification of personal data with the core purpose of profit-marking. To put this in simple words, Surveillance capitalism is a business in which profit is made from your data. But this has never been the reason that the tech giants give you as to why they started these companies was not to make an online community but sort of like mirror for the real community that existed in real life. The reason why we created Instagram was to be able to share and communicate visually in real life. The foundation of LinkedIn is that every individual having a public professional identity. It looks like these companies are generous right? All they want is for you to build a strong community and close to the people who matter the most to you. Share your life experience and have access to all the information you might require, without thinking over them. It’s time to get attention over things that are exploiting you in this modern world. We are currently living in an attention economy. An economy which provides the platforms that manages to win your attention get more money. For this reason all social media companies have similar business model, getting hooked on your phone screen as much as you can. You are probably wondering that’s not true. They don’t get me hooked because they cannot force us to do so. I decide to use it when I ant. I am the only one who can control it well. Let’s figure that out. You don’t like to spend a lot of time on Facebook? No problem, we will allow your friends to tag you. Whenever, they post something. You will get notification over Gmail but while checking email you cannot see that post until or unless you could open up Facebook. Maybe you are on Instagram, and wondering , if you will have new photos or videos to watch, just pull refresh button, and if you keep scrolling who knows maybe you will found something interesting and no one knows that interesting thing would be beneficial or not? According to behavioral phycology such situations are called positive reinforcement. It’s just seemed as a reward. A like on Facebook, a retweet or a mention on twitter, an endorsement on LinkedIn, personalized news feed on Tik-tok or double tap on Instagram makes you happy or sad and become the desired actions which make you to spend more time on the platform. You will unconsciously learn to relate the rewards with the action and now you have reason to keep on engaging more and more. The platforms are unfortunately design to hook you up on screen 24/7. Your attention stolen from you and now you get addicted to it and it’s difficult to overcome. We not only modify our personalities but also set up our daily routine according to it. But pondering over this point you would try to found solutions to restrict such things. So, the problem is being solved here, when you get to know your daily routine, your personality, by getting up from bed you have to take morning selfie to send snap streak, just to update this world. In short, not only life becomes meaningless but also purposeless because it seems as the mannerism is the only key to live. Society is standing on the verge of chaos.