The Problem With Big Tech,

Is that it's too big.

Just a handful of companies own most of the major communication and social media platforms. You have Facebook having acquired Whatsapp and Instagram, you have Twitter which has become a mammoth presence of its own, you have Google practically owning your entire digital history through it's advertising mechanism, analytics tools and search engine. And many other data aggregators have your digital info too, but I want to focus on the social media companies.

These are for-profit companies. They don't care about an open and free internet so much as they do about money, because, well, that's business.

So clearly the idea of corporate-backed censorship has many, many problems, the only important one being how these entities have no ability, much less any authority, to determine what can and cannot be censored. What can and cannot be certified as the "truth". Nor do any of their 3rd-party 'fact-checkers', who are frankly nobodies sitting who knows where, trying to ascertain the veracity of information coming in from all corners of this vast world. Do they go around investigating things on the ground before arriving at a conclusion? Of course not, they most probably do the sane thing and cross-verify with multiple sources closer to the home of the information (or they are based in the same geographical region themselves). At the minimum, that's what they should do anyway. Which still makes them less credible than actual folks on the ground who are directly affected by, or participating in whatever the information is about.

In any case, the larger direction I'm driving at here is how when these companies begin acting like arbiters of truth, and these entities are themselves beholden to $$$, the truth can very easily be subverted to suit a larger narrative. I think it's beyond foolish to entrust, even just in perception, any larger entity with something as powerful as the ability to determine what is true; whether this is a large corporation, or a government, the outcome will be the same. It's so obvious, yet the world seems frighteningly comfortable with being fed conclusions about their world and their surroundings from just a handful of sources.

In a recent discussion I had with a friend about social media platforms in particular, but internet and marketing in general, what came out clearly was the alarming trend of a decrease in the level of democratisation of information and the diversity of communication channels, and a sharp increase in the monopolisation of them instead.

When Twitter and the like had just begun to boom, you could passively receive information about anything from anywhere in any language. It was all just a constant stream of unfiltered news and perspectives. More importantly, we had the freedom to choose what to listen to and what to tune out, without actually affecting the existence of any of the information around us. We also had the freedom to assess what we hear for ourselves and determine what to believe. In other words, we were the arbiters of truth.

This might sound like a bad idea, but collectively, the truth always comes out on top. I'm sure you can think back to certain events in your own region (or even the world at large), certain shifts in perspective you or those around you may have had as a result of some things becoming more obvious (or less believable) over time.

A shift in perspective is only possible if other perspectives are allowed to exist and be expressed freely, and, similarly, if there is a free flow of information that we can scrutinise. These are simply not possible in a world where an "authority" of any kind decides for us what perspective is the right one to have, with the information being tailored accordingly and served straight to us, often without our own knowledge.

This brings me to another related point, and what I find to be the most troubling aspect in the evolution of big tech (and marketing in general) - personalisation. Personalised feeds, personalised ads, personalised search results. Everything is filtered and narrowed down to what algorithms assume we will like, based on certain past internet behaviours of ours (among other details).

It's a good idea - narrowing down the content a site visitor sees to only what's most relevant to them, thereby making the web experience for the visitor more meaningful and engaging. All very good for e-commerce websites and such. When this is applied to the actual dissemination of information however, things go awry.

I remember how, shortly before I left the platform entirely, my Facebook feed had become so bland. All I would see were advertisements and posts from Cracked.com (because that was the only page I ever engaged with). Admittedly, my personalised feed would have been an outlier in its lack of engaging content, but that's not the exact downside I want to highlight here. What I do want to focus on is - can you imagine the kind of digital world we have been shoved into, when everything we read and see is only what is supposedly relevant to us? Silos. That's what our digital experiences are.

The content we are served, be it news or otherwise, is highly personalised enough to keep us wrapped up in our own circle-jerks of choosing, making it nearly impossible for us to experience anything contrary to what we want to hear or are used to. I'm not saying there is a blackout of any contrarian views (even though there is), I'm saying that our everyday engagement with digital media is "relevant" enough to de-normalise anything contrarian to the point of absurdity.

This is an especially bad scenario on a social media platform, and particularly when it involves anything that people have strong opinions about. Rather than allowing for a free flow of voices in all directions, rather than enabling engagement and dialogue with others, personalisation lets us stew in our own biases long enough that we in our minds de-legitimise anything contradictory, and very often de-humanise those who are contradictory as well; because we become accustomed to hearing only a certain perspective.

This makes it so easy to keep folks divided on contentious issues, to box people into different camps, and all of this enabled by the platforms run by these for-profit businesses (and who do we know likes to keep people divided, I wonder). We're already closed off to a diversity of opinions and information - we're disempowered already here - so how hard is it going to be next to be fed certain "truths" about a variety of topics?

Digital media had the power to break the stranglehold that traditional media always had on the flow of information, by making each and every one of us contributors to the space; now it too looks to be going the way of traditional media.

All that's well and good though, as long as people continue to socialise face-to-face and live in communities, but it's hard to ignore how pervasive digital media and social networking are in our lives. Combined with other traditional forms of media, we are altogether too dependent on external entities to shape our views for us on a lot of things. And pandemic aside, there are lot of factors in modern lifestyle that have made us, in my view, more isolated in many ways, but that's a topic for another day.

The internet was an amazing, wild thing for a long time, with anyone having access to it being able to put anything at all out into the web and being able to stumble across many different people and websites and what not. Now with everything converging (including search engine results) around whatever "persona" we project online, and that too being concentrated in a handful of media, the diversity of both information and channels of communication is lost. Critically, the slow monopolisation of communication channels makes it that much easier to control narratives and to artificially make one or a few perspectives dominant in mainstream discourse (and consequently our psyche).

At least the open exchange of information on the internet was a fun phenomenon while it lasted.

It is human nature to avoid conflict and contradictions, evolving technology has simply focused on that; and in an attempt to make our digital experiences more pleasant, it has evolved to simply screw everything over instead.

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