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.