Public policy-making is a tough job, yet important for the societal wellbeing

Policy-making is nothing but an authoritative allocation of values. It is the operational state of core ethics, standards and a statement of a rigid intent or blend. Policies implicated the image of a perfect society. Ideally, policies cannot be secluded from interests, conflicts, authority or justice and from the dialog. Policymaking is a very complex and diverse agenda when it comes to a contemporary, multifaceted, plural society like the United States or in Europe or in India or elsewhere where diverse people do reside. It requires the approaches to policy analysis, science related to behavioral understanding and analysis of systems along with public data to formulate a refined policy for the purpose of societal wellbeing and for public welfare. The policy-making is all about solving the problem. Examples of some key societal problems are unemployment issue, clean air, purity of water, the corruption, the criminality, the education, efficient use of energy, the well-being of the people, public health, and immigration, the safety, and security issues. Though the policy is implemented by Government bodies, the politicians, the member of the parliament, and other key interest groups but people also do participate in policy making as they perceive that there are problems, issues for which government can provide resolutions.

I think out of all the developments mentioned above, the media platform and technological advancements both play a vital role which can influence policy to solve the problem of most of the above-mentioned key issues. However, I would like to touch upon the developments of the education and well-being of the people.

A study from Edison Research revealed that –

“. . . 58 percent of Americans who are 12 or even older have a personal Facebook page; 20 percent have a personal LinkedIn account; More than 19 percent have a personal Instagram account and about 16 percent have a personal Twitter account.”

Furthermore, over 8000 tweets are posted every second in twitter and 3 - 4 billion pieces of content are shared every day on Facebook.

Now you can imagine the power of social media and how it can influence the masses. The influence of the social media platform can be useful to design a strong public policy but taking a collective opinion and implementing a strong policy. A policy once designed is not going to be effective through the generations. It must be revisited over a period to address the upcoming roadblocks, issues, and societal problem and to do that technological advancement in the field of distributed databases, cloud, Big Data and Hadoop, Data science, Data Analytics and Artificial Intelligence in the model age play a bigger role.

Through the media, people learn how government policies will affect them, and at the same time, governments also take advantage of gaining feedback on their policies, guidelines, and programs. The media acts as the prime channel between individuals who want to influence policy and policymakers controlling the space of political discourse and regulating the flow of information. When the media pays attention to any specific issue, it may influence public policy. The media stimulates public policy by shaping public opinion by influencing attitudes and beliefs and providing information to the policymakers.

The media has a huge influence on shaping the public belief of the masses. They can form or change public opinion in multiple ways depending on what is the required objective or purpose. Mass media is a communication platform whether it is written, broadcast, or spoken that outrages a large spectrum of audience. This includes television, radio, advertising, movies, the Internet, newspapers, magazines, social media, and so forth. Mass media has a significant force in modern culture.

In the morning when we get up our mind always reminds up to read the feed from our favorite social media pages such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, WhatsApp or other popular media platforms. Nowadays the traditional visit of news channels or newspapers has reduced a lot as the masses have access to a great deal of information in the social media site that before the news is even telecasted in television people are already aware of the incident through social media channels. Thanks to the power of social media.

Social media play a great role in the field of promoting education and knowledge base. Nowadays, we get access to an immense repository of details, eBooks, free webinars, free sessions, YouTube channels, LinkedIn articles, Facebook and twitter contents that we get easy access to many different materials which helped everyone a lot. Through the power of Information Technology, the Internet, we get huge access to information, resulting in it can influence the power of decision making while required to solve the need for training and knowledge of educating ourselves of any topic. To leverage such technical depth of education, technological advancement is something which is critical to the overall success of making a good policy-making through computational power, speed, and robustness.

I would also, like to touch base upon why do people like to share so much of information in social media? Why does the social media platform allow people to use their platform free of charge and allow to do countless posts (I am referring to LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter primarily). According to a study, it is revealed that when someone likes our post, comment on our post in social media, the brain secretes a chemical called dopamine which is associated with the brain’s decision-making attention, learning, and emotional responses. It also enables us not only to see rewards but to act to move toward them.

The more we see likes, shares on our post the secretion of the unit of dopamine increases and that unit of the brain also prompt us to share more content and hence we spend many hours on the social media platform. I do not know if this is a good habit or bad habit of spending a lot of time on the social media platform, but certainly, I would like to infer through this that the power of social media plays a vital role and through collective opinion, polls this is possible to implement a robust decision and policy which may be beneficial to society. Social media has transformed the way we do business by focusing on needs and empowering the users. In social media all contents are not a good or trusted kind so carefully choosing the right information for our use is highly advisable so that we are not misguided by the unscrupulous users.

Conclusion

Policy-making is a complex process as multiple stakeholders are involved here. Other than social media platforms blogs are also even used to express opinion and interests, big and open data also provide input for evidence-based policy-making, the integration of various types of simulation and modeling techniques can also provide much more insight and lead to reliable outcomes. Collecting and gathering all the details in comprehensive research is needed in order to come up with a health policy making for the wellbeing of society.

REFERENCES:

[1] The Role of Social Media in Consumer Decision Making

https://www.relevance.com/blog/the-role-of-social-media-in-consumer-decision-making/

[2] Janssen, M., Wimmer, M. A., & Deljoo, A. (Eds.). (2015). Policy practice and digital science: Integrating complex systems, social simulation and public administration in policy research (Vol. 10). Springer.

[3] An Introduction to the Policy Process Theories, Concepts, and Models of Public Policy Making, Fourth Edition by Thomas A. Birkland.

[4] Politics and Policy Making in Education by Stephen J. Ball.