The Illusion of Digital Choice

The internet has been home to digital content since its advent. The archaic HTML based websites were the point of initiation for digital content, which has since gone through an evolution on boosters apparently to reach the current state of micro-blogs, blogs, pictures, short videos, long videos and whatever else you can think of in way of digital content. 

Digital Content Boom

With the increase in the penetration of internet, and with mobile devices becoming more powerful and capable, the amount of digital content being produced has sky rocketed in recent years. It is estimated that 2.5 quintillion bytes of data was created per day in 2020. That is 2,500,000,000,000,000,000 bytes (I took the effort to count and types - it's 17 zeroes)! And all this when only 60% of the world population has access to internet, with most of the data accessed / generated via smart phones. The journey of content has also been pretty obvious - starting from text based content like tweets, emails, blogs to snaps, insta posts, stories, reels and short videos, leading to more data generation and subsequent consumption.

Ka-ching

Marketing has always been closely linked to a brand's ability to ride the trend. As digital media and digital content became popular, digital marketing too dug it's tooth into it. From advertising on websites, to sending generic emails, to generating tweets, blogs, videos, pictures and memes, digital marketing has probably evolved at a pace abreast with the digital revolution itself. And it has been a rousing success for marketing, because it is estimated that close to 70% of instagram users check out a picture or video shared by brands. The basic concept, of course, is maintaining and maximizing the time a user spends on a particular app or website, browsing the promotional content. And with great marketing, comes great moolah.

Painting individual bulls-eyes

From statistics and the teenagers we notice recording weird acts on their smartphones in the streets, it is evident that the amount of content generated daily is immense. For the sake of the moolah, it is imperative that users eyeballs need to remain hooked to one's app or website in order to view more and more promotional content, subconsciously influencing the user's buying choices IRL. How, then, is that achieved? If you remember an android-faced Mark Zuckerberg in front of a committee, you know the answer to it - by personalizing the content offered to a user based on millions of data points gathered via billions of interactions. Every interaction of a user becomes an event that is recorded and used to refine the content curation algorithm (AI! Yeah baby!) for the user, ensuring more and more screen time for the app or website (the current estimate is 142 minutes spent on social media daily on an average).

Frog in a digital well

The concept of personalization or curation of content might be good for the corporations, but, from the perspective of the user, it constructs a ailo around the user, entrapping her in content filtered to the T based on previous interactions. What that means is that the user always gets only a specific subset of the content, no matter what is generated outside of that. If you are a fan of Venn Diagrams, think of the subset as a very small bubble inside a very large circle - that is all the user sees if left to her own devices. 

The illusion of choice

Every social media or digital content app makes the user believe they are free to view whatever content they choose, follow who they want but the dire reality of it is that their digital world is akin to a softer version of the Truman Show, with choices seeming abundant yet restricted to a small set. The user, of course, can search for specific terms and inorganically increase the bounds of their dome, including new data points, but that requires knowledge of events outside the dome, creating a paradox in itself for internet driven generations - to view content outside the curated items, you need knowledge of outside events; to have knowledge of outside events, you need relevant content to be made available. The primary means by which a user gets her daily dose of world events is, today, primarily digital - tweets, websites, videos on social media. What appears on the user's feed from the gigantic set of events generated at any instance is dependent on the previous interactions. If someone has not shown interest in soccer, they would probably not know that Argentina won the Copa America after 28 years; and they have no way of knowing it unless they know that there is a tournament like Copa America or a game like soccer if their knowledge is driven off digital content. If they have not shown any prior interest in Soccer, even searching for Argentina using common search engines might not yield their Copa America win as a first page item.

All is not lost

While the major players that dominate the internet are instrumental in perpetuating this art of digital confinement, there are those who want to use internet for knowledge sharing rather than profiteering. Search engines like duckduckgo provide avenues to showcase how an internet without money-making motives would look like and that is hope enough for an inevitable revolution that would come, eventually, gradually.

The interminable love of the underdog

Human race and it's incessant love affair with the notion of the rise of the underdog is as old as civilization itself. For as long as a semblance of societal hierarchy has existed, the concept of the underdog has been romanticized in the minds of the people in the lower strata of the societal hierarchy. Humans are perhaps the only species that can feel a sense of achievement in the triumphs of others. The sheer thought of witnessing a low ranked team win (or even put up a close match) against a higher ranked team, watching a challenger win the title against the reigning champion, seeing the current government overthrown by a completely new regime...the list is endless.

The order of the society

For as long as the concept of civilization has existed, there has been the concept of a hierarchy that has existed alongside it. Castes, professions, economic sections, player/team rankings - it has been called by many names, but the core concept remains the same - there are those who are at the summit, there are those who are on the incline trying to reach the summit and there are those who are at the base and have either no desire or no hope of reaching the summit. That has been the order, the way of life. From the leader of a tribe, to the kshatriya and the Brahmins of Vedic period, to the kings in mediaeval times, to elected leaders of democratic nations, to the elite 1%, to the champions of a sport - there have always been people who are identified as the zenith of achievement in the society or a specific area; and then there are those who aspire to replace these groups or individuals at the top of the pyramid, and an indifferent mass of people who are too busy with the travails of survival to think of upward movement in the ecosystem.

The Cyclic nature of world order

Throughout history, there is a pattern to the overthrowing of the alpha by the challengers. It always follows the same modus operandi - the middle section, with the help of the lower strata, overthrow the upper class. The middle becomes the top, a new middle is formed while the bottom remains at the bottom more or less, except for some who move to the new middle. And then, after a period, the cycle repeats. This is true for society at large, political parties, democracies, economies, sports, even in office politics. Every Revolution or civil war the world has seen is an example of this; the entire concept of anti-incumbency stems from this fundamental truth of human nature - humans favor the challengers, not the rulers; and the human need to dethrone the rulers is insatiable.

Punching above weight

Think of a sport that you watch often, and imagine two teams or individuals (not your favourite ones, to avoid any bias), one ranked in the top 3 and the other ranked somewhere in the 30s (or an unseeded one), facing each other in a match. As s person with no bias for or against any of the participants, who would you be more likely to support? Exceptions apart, most of us would want in our heart that the team or individual with a lower rank would defeat the one ranked in the top 3. As humans, we romanticize the victories that defy odds; we want that the challenger who has worked his way to this match up via sheer hardwork and willpower should reap the fruits by emerging victorious against the one touted as one of the greats of the game, even though we have no apparent gain from the triumph. The same goes for economic classes - where we want people with regular middle class upbringing to break the glass ceiling and enter the elite 1%, or in politics, where we often vote for some new to oust the people in power. The churn of people is an undeniable favourite of masses, and it has to do with how we view ourselves. We are the middle layer, struggling to get to the top in some aspect or other. That makes it easy for us to relate to the underdog - because we are the underdog in some sense, in some aspect of life. Once that bind of relatability is forged, emotions soon follow and we find ourselves in the corner of Rocky trying to outlast Creed, of Switzerland trying to out-kick France, of Aam Admi trying to overthrow the incumbent - because we see a bit of us in them; we see the struggle and the spirit and the dedication which we ourselves are putting in somewhere else.

Kyunki...master bhi kabhi challenger tha (the master was once a challenger)

In all the emotions and the cheering for the underdog, there is an essential detail we often overlook - the master that we are now asking to be dethroned was once a challenger; it took all their spirit and willpower and dedication and prowess to become a master and they have been consistently putting in their 100% to stay there. Mass memory, of course, is goldfish-y, and the masses would not remember the moment when this master took its place at the top, they had been cheered on by the same masses that are now cheering against them. That is the reality we live in.

But cheer on!

No matter who your heart supports, the underdog or the alpha, the incumbent or the challenger, do cheer them on. The uniqueness of humanity lies in empathy, where one can affect the energy levels of someone else by merely a few acts of encouragement. There will be days when probably you would be an underdog and you just might gave people in your corner, people you have never known even, cheering you on, and that can be the difference between winning and losing!