Personalized Realities and Opinion Bubbles

The Sixth World Religion: Social Media

Withdrawal of church in Western societies

We have been watching how the Christian religions are losing their base in the Western societies since the second half of the 20th century. Many factors play a role here, from the exponential growth of speed in scientific development, the power of the consumer society, where money can buy everything, to women’s emancipation and equal roles in working and decision-making, the disintegration of families, media’s influence on each household’s daily life - the reasons are infinite.

Church used to fill very important roles in millions of individual lives that has by now disappeared. Mostly, church and the community provided safety and security in the world and not only in a physical sense - more importantly, by giving a moral compass to follow. They provided the answers in doubt for the most important questions in an individual’s life: how to survive the death of a loved one, how to overcome marriage crisis, how to hold the family together and how to respond or cope with the challenges of the external world (like two world wars, two global economic crises, not to mention the Spanish flu)

Members of Western societies have largely lost this spiritual support by today, leaving an unfilled void in people’s needs for guidance.

However, the need for such support is stronger today than ever - on one hand due to the external challenges of the world, on the other hand, due to the high-level of alienation in the society.

The Need for Belonging is Stronger than Rationality?

What has always puzzled me, how brilliant people seem to believe crazy things. And I’m not talking about little bit crazy, I’m talking about real crazy.

If you look at the history of the human species, our need for inclusion far surpasses our need for rationality. Historically, if somebody did not agree with the group, he was excluded, his survival was in danger. Through the centuries, the instinct of the safety provided by the group got genetically imprinted in the human species. Our need of belonging to a group over-writes all other needs. Abraham Maslow has already shown in the 40s of the last century that the need for belonging comes straight after the basic needs of safety for humans. More than that, belonging to the group equals basic safety.

Today, when the protective and guiding power of the church is in recluse, you see the need for inclusion manifest more than ever. And people search and chose their referent groups - a referent group is any group that people see as a source of their identity. In this case, all the other people, who share the same belief - from whatever is available. M.ainly from what is provided by social media.

?Let’s take the example of the question of global warming. One person might say about the subject: “I know that global warming is an indisputable fact.” The other person says: “It’s a hoax. Global warming is a nonsense.” Neither one of these people has read a single book about global warming, they do not have a clue what they are talking about. Yet, they have - what’s called - a referent group. They want to fit in with a group of people and they will say whatever this group of people believes. Rationality is far less important than our need for belonging; in reality, we use rationality to defend inclusion.

Priests, whose opinions and advise local communities were following, were educated people and felt responsible for the directions they led the community to. This is not to suggest that this direction was always the right direction, or the goal was even highly moral (eg. Catholic church’s passivity in WWII), however, the majority of Christian priests were highly educated and were meant to lead the people by the principle of “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself”.

Self-made Prophets

People with social issues in isolation, who nobody listened to so far, realize that they can collect thousands of “friends” or at least connections in social media and they do not even need to give their face to the ideas they share. They very soon realize that they can say anything they want without giving any thought or responsibility, and crowds will read and believe it. Even worse is that some of these self-made prophets are true psychiatric cases and can collect tens of thousands of followers in the blink of an eye on social media.

In the 21st century there still exists a Flat Earth Society, with 95K followers on Twitter. While this society is as yet harmless, the infamous QAnon have already demonstrated how one or several lunatics that suddenly find followers on social media can mean serious physical threat to society.

Opinion Bubbles

The online algorithms work in a way that they register which pages you visit, and they will always offer you similar content and nothing else. For example, if your neighbour is an anti-vaxer, and you read and like her posts on social media, it is likely that you will never see any information about the usefulness of vaccines. You will keep being offered posts of other anti-vaxers. It is no wonder, that you will soon become an anti-vaxer yourself, and start your own posts in the subject, which will create and collect further anti-vaxer communities.

A large majority of people thus lives in opinion bubbles: their only information source is social media; they receive their information in the form of personal opinions only about a limited range of subjects from a single perspective.

It would be logical to say that it is easy to distinguish opinions from facts, but this would endanger their belonging to the group. In addition, as we will see below, there are serious gaps in people’s capability of critical thinking and distinguishing facts from opinions in many developed societies. ?

An OECD’s survey revealed a surprising fact that – on OECD average – 47% of the population is unable to distinguish opinions from facts.

They (that is more than half of the population of the countries in the down-left quartal of the chart) will take what they read on social media as if they were scientifically proven facts.

Distinguishing facts from opinions and access to training on how to detect biased information in school

Source: Are 15-year-olds prepared to deal with fake news and misinformation? (OECD / J Suarez-Alvarez)

I believe we all heard stories that some of our acquaintances relate with full persuasion around COVID. Such stories include that the government pays several thousand euros, if you claim that a deceased family member died of COVID, or the stick used for testing is actually an antenna (I couldn’t clearly get what exactly this antenna would do in your nose), or the famous chip in the vaccine and numerous other hilarious stories.

?What gives reason for worry is that often educated, intelligent people relate these stories, as they cannot distinguish opinions from facts, they cannot or do not want to verify the sources of information.

Because believing is always easier than rationally searching for facts.

A consequence in politics is the recent widespread popularity around the world of populist, demagogue political ideals. It is so much easier to believe for voters that they will not need to pay taxes but will receive tons of state support, than to question, how the state budget would then be financed.

Personalised Realities

In the current information flow, everybody has his or her custom-tailored reality. Once you decided that there is no climate change, you will soon realize that everybody says exactly the same. Once you are impressed by the posts that COVID doesn’t exist, you will find that all other posts will confirm this “fact”.

Algorithms will make sure that you do not receive any contradictory information that may raise any doubt. Therefore, the information you are fed becomes reality. Your reality. And should you accidentally stumble on some scientifically proven facts that question your reality, you will conclude that not everyone can be wrong, so the facts are wrong.

The only way out for a society is investing and investing and investing even more into high quality, dogma-free educational systems that teaches science, facts, and above all, critical questioning and individual thinking to the children.

Unfortunately, this is often against the interest of the actual political powers, who need easily influenceable, low-educated voters so that they can drag them into their own opinion-bubble.

"If you believe that training is expensive, it is because you do not know what ignorance costs." (Michael LeBoeuf)

?The costs of low-educated, social-media and neighbour educated society are currently burying the world economy.

?No better conclusion for this article than citing the already mentioned OECD study’s bottom line:

Preserving democratic values and reinforcing trust in public institutions relies on having well-informed citizens. Students must develop autonomous and advanced reading skills that include the ability to navigate ambiguity, and triangulate and validate viewpoints. Students’ training in distinguishing between fact and opinion, and detecting biased information and malicious content such as phishing emails greatly varies between countries and students’ socio-economic profiles. Schools can foster proficient readers in a digital world by closing these gaps and teaching students basic digital literacy.