Scenario 1:
You Have logged in Instagram, to check your feed, and just like that, fifteen minutes zaps by!
Scenario 2:
You have logged in to YouTube, and you keep on viewing the videos that are being dished out to you, endlessly just to realise that it’s already 3 am!
We All have gone through both the above scenario, especially the YouTube rabbit hole is a never-ending trap.
Now, question arises, what has these to do with confirmation bias? The quick answer is everything!
Imagine, the cave dwelling prehistoric chimp never collected fire from.
We can imagine this process might have been the most precarious and inconvenient moment of its life until then.
Now imagine if some other chimp wouldn’t have to figure out a way to light it by him/herself.
We can imagine how inconvenient the experiments would have been. It might have been marginally ostracizing as well, given prehistoric chimp society.
We would have been a part of dystopian society, tied up to a fire distributing institution.
Coming back to the moot point, we became “We” because our predecessor took the inconvenient route.
We used to look for a different route to another part of the world, just to prove a point.
The present world dishes everything to us tailor made to our preferences, to serve us better.
All the knowledge of humanity is at our fingertips, but we “decide” to stick to “random assortment of tiktok videos” in YouTube and Instagram reels.
We decide because the system learns that we like to consume those contents, and so it serves.
From the content disbursement platform standpoint, I see no fault.
They are in the business of making us spend more time on their platform so that platform can earn advertising dollars.
It is the consumer who needs to come out of this “comfort” zone of “similar” content.
This unending, disastrous cycle of confirmation bias that leads to being suffocated by “stuff” which kills the very core spark that makes us human.
We need to come out to find out the fire that our long-forgotten chimp forbearer did, he/she came out of the convenient cave, went into a perilous situation of an unknown entity and tried taming it thus giving birth to a civilization which is now regressing back.
Leave a Reply