Fractured Realities

Yesterday Ify Nwadiwe posted a video on TikTok that touched on my thoughts around social media and the lack of a shared reality💬 See my post yesterday on social media and newspapers :

We live in a time where information isn’t accessible in the same way across the board. We live in a time where it’s been proven that different people click on comments on an Instagram post, reel, or video and see different comments because the algorithm is operating there. So I say all this to say is what if we got so caught up in the very obvious nature of the votes, that the information about why people should be voting for who is not there….But I think that for the people who are just inundated with just false information, misinformation, all the podcasts by You Know Who, all the Fox News, it’s not going to be a simple tweet video that’s going to change their mind. It’s just not…What I’m saying is that we’re turning inwards, and I think we need to be strategizing. I think that we need to be finding ways to connect with those who are willing to get the information. I’ve been calling and talking to a lot of people. There are people who are saying that they’ve spoken to people and they’re like, well, I don’t know anything about Kamala, which I know. I feel like it feels wild because when your algorithm is built a certain way, you’re like, how could you not know that? How could you not have seen that? And I guess that’s the point of this video, is that people aren’t getting the same information. They’re getting the information that is dealed to them. And the person, one of the people who controls how that information is dealt with to people was waiting for election results with Donald Trump last night.

The algorithms amplify our divisions. They take small cracks and make them chasms. People with similar ideals, when fed radically different information diets, turn into radically different people. Now, with each of us subject to these individualized, personalized, and finely tuned feeds, we live in separate realities. We are fractured, each occupying our own holographic world curated by a handful of megacorporations. How very cyberpunk of us.