Knowledge is power, they say. We are knowledgeable, the crowds scream. Where does it originate? Believe you me, it’s all a ploy. A click here and a click there, overstimulated, though ill-informed. It comes back to you, just as it does me. Stuck in these endless loops of consumption, we believe we are aware.
Sometimes intangible walls seem like a greater force - ones that confine the mind instead of the body. How did that saying go, “I think therefore I am?” or was it the other way around. If I am to be brutally honest, neither seem to be true. We seize to exist the moment we seize to think and do borrowed thoughts really count? I think not. Freedom of thought, freedom of speech, freedom to conceive – it’s all a façade. Stuck in these intangible walls, we believe we are free.
How do you conceive danger? Does being in shackles count? What if I told you, you were stuck in an enclosed chamber. What if it was an echo chamber, would you conceive it as danger? Facebook, Instagram, Twitter – they’re all the same. Creating these facades of freedom, they think they can fool us? Creating these loops of information, they think they can fool us? Making us believe we are autonomous; they think they can fool us?
But they are though.
Stuck in these echo chambers, we believe we are aware.
This post effectively captures the conflicting aspects of our contemporary, "knowledgeable" society. It reminded me of the Netflix documentary "The Social Dilemma," which clearly shows how social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter put us in echo chambers and mold our opinions and perceptions, makes me think of this. It's concerning how these virtual environments, meant to bring us together, can in reverse restrict our freedom of thought by feeding preconceptions and limiting our access to various viewpoints.
This was insanely and eerily good! This piece reminds me of how, often, we're so preoccupied with social media and turn to it whenever we need a distraction. There are studies that claim that our brains are drowning in dopamine due to our social media addictions and dependency, and it's clearly becoming a larger issue day by day. This is actually one of my favorite topics to read about. While I do think social media has connected the world a lot more, it's done a fair share of damage too. The countless echo chambers, immoral activities, cyber crimes and misinformation on social media have proved to be way more harmful to the world than precedented. I feel like now with…
This was a very beautifully articulated and well written blog! Reading it made me recall the session we had on who owns the media we consume and its relevance to the type of media whereby apps such as Instagram & Twitter or even TikTok all gather content of more or less the same type yet are divided significantly by their differing interactive measures. Scrolling through TikTok and Instagram helps one only view media whilst Twitter uses reading and interpreting as a tool for its transfer thus far becoming a more widely trusted platform.
However as you mention we are still stuck in a vicious cycle as in the case of eco chambers and intangible walls that confine us to what…
This was a really lovely piece. It reminded me often of the argument that surrounds the very selective and personal nature of social media. Like, a lot of our twitter and Instagram feeds are designed in accordance to certain algorithms that display familiar narratives that we have either searched for, liked, or followed. It does bring up the question whether we are actually hearing other perspectives on social media or simply listening to voices like our own repeated back to us in the form of similar content. Are we really becoming more knowledgeable, or simply listening to the sound of our own words and thoughts in someone else's voice?
I believe this post is a great reflection of the idea of the "rhizomatic" knowledge structures as presented by Deleuze and Guattari. It states that rather than knowledge stemmong from a source and then developing upwards, it is rather perpetuated and built in a rhizomatic structure, borrowing from different ideas and developing while intertwined with each other. However, the ease of transmitting knowledge in the information age may threaten the very knowledge structure due to the difficulty in distinguishing between fact and fiction.