Everybody knows the future isn’t what it used to be – what’s changed is that we don’t know, or we know a whole lot less, about what everybody thinks it will be.
If that doesn’t seem to be of any consequence, one has only to consider the potentially seismic outcomes of two globally significant polls this year; the Brexit result in Britain, and Donald Trump’s election in the US.
Neither was accurately foreseen, and nor were the forces that produced them properly appreciated.
And one of the key reasons, in the view of trends analyst Dion Chang, is the increasing yet under-estimated influence of the dynamics of social media behaviour across the world.
He said in an interview this week: “One of the biggest change agents today is social media – beyond the advertising, the breaking news, the retail and all of that; it is a change agent in terms of polarising people by providing them with echo chambers, or the space to create echo chambers where what you hear is what you want to hear. This profoundly influences perceptions, and people get blinded and blindsided.”
A decade ago when – as Forbes contributing writer Steve Olenski noted in 2013, “you may have heard of Facebook (but) you had no clue what a Tweet was” – it might popularly have been thought that the advent of untrammelled, easy-access forums for sharing information and opinion would herald an expansion of knowledge and a reinforcement of universal humanist values.
The opposite appears to have happened.
In a penetrating Guardian article in July, “How technology disrupted the truth”, Katherine Viner wrote: “Social media has swallowed the news … ushering in an era when everyone has their own facts.”
And “everyone” in this context is a lot of people. The number of worldwide social media users has reached 1.9 billion and is expected to grow to some 2.5 billion by 2018. Facebook, according to Dave Chaffey of Smart Insights website, rules supreme, with more than 1.5 billion active users.
Pew Research Center’s Andrew Perrin writes that “nearly two-thirds of American adults (65 percent) use social networking sites, up from 7 percent when Pew began systematically tracking social media usage in 2005”, noting that social media has influenced everything from work, politics and political deliberation to communication patterns around the world, how people get and share information or news about every possible aspect of living.
In every post-2000 upheaval or major news event – from the Arab Spring to the disruptive strategy of the Economic Freedom Fighters in Parliament, from terror attacks to the Fallist campaigns – the mobile phone, and the dizzyingly large networks they connect to, have proved potent not only as sources of information, but as a means of generating reactions, whether support or opposition, rage or ridicule.
In South Africa, mobile phone use has revolutionised mass access to networks, information … and echo chambers.
And, Chang noted, the most critical feature of this was its impact on how society managed itself.
Viner noted in her Guardian piece in July that when a fact “begins to resemble whatever you feel is true, it becomes very difficult for anyone to tell the difference”.
In the Brexit campaign, she wrote, the leave campaign “took full advantage” of this. Viner cited leave-campaign donor Arron Banks’s candid assessment of the winning strategy.
“It was taking an American-style media approach,” Banks is quoted as saying.
“What they said early on was ‘Facts don’t work’, and that’s it. The remain campaign featured fact, fact, fact, fact, fact.
“It just doesn’t work. You have got to connect with people emotionally. It’s the Trump success.”
And, as emerged just a few weeks ago, it worked for Trump, too.
Chang said: “When your echo chamber becomes the truth, that is your reality, and that’s worrying.” This tended to be polarising, often generating the kind of xenophobic or nationalistic impulses that characterised the political right.
“The way in which people are fed information really feeds into this, and we saw that with Trump being elected. The media failed to pick up on what the real sentiment was, because the fact is, it was the echo chambers that created the rolling motion.”
Viner pointed out that – whether through panic, malice or deliberate manipulation – unfounded claims had a wide reach, and that “whatever the motive, falsehoods and facts now spread the same way”.
The closed-circuit production of echo-chamber sentiments was reinforced by what Viner described as “algorithms – such as the one that powers Facebook’s news feed (that) are designed to give us more of what they think we want – which means that the version of the world we encounter every day in our own personal stream has been invisibly curated to reinforce our pre-existing beliefs”.
In Chang’s view, this is social media’s “downside and a very dangerous part of it …”.
He added: “People will migrate to places where they feel comfortable.
“If you are discerning, you will rely on different sources to figure out what joins the dots.
“But if you are just a consumer of media, the chances are you will simply default into an echo chamber, and the effects of that are starting to manifest in unfolding events in the world.”
In turn, Chang argued, a discernible trend in consumer sentiment showed that people were increasingly expecting business to go beyond the profit motive and demonstrate a willingness to “push for positive change”, and reinforce values beyond the traditional bottom-line benchmark of success.
Businesses were increasingly being judged on how they were run, and what they “stood for”.
“New, agile companies which are taking market share from traditional big business have succeeded in defining themselves as having a greater purpose than profit – and the challenge to established business is to be certain of what their value is, and what their brand stands for, as a way of attracting a young, diverse workforce and client base”.
There was a “new world order”, he said, and one in which 20th century ways had become obsolete.