The Influential Mind Made Me Think #3

I kept on reading "The Influential Mind" by Tali Sharot. As expected, after reading about 15 pages, I had to stop and think. I will be sharing my thoughts here. When I started writing this post, I realized that this is the third time I will be sharing evoked thoughts from this book. Therefore, I decided to start numbering them. Welcome to a new edition of #TheIfluentialMindMadeMeThink.

This time, before debating, let me share with you a quote from the book.

Take an infamous Facebook experiment. In January 2012, Facebook manipulated the news feeds of over half a million users so that some users saw a large number of positive posts in their feed, while others encountered a large number of negative posts. The Facebook researchers found that users who saw more positive posts, such as images of people embracing, posted more positive messages themselves. Those who saw more negative posts, such as complaints about service in a restaurant, created more negative posts on their wall. True, we do not know how the people who posted were feeling, but we can say that positive and negative messages travel fast online. The experiment did not go down well with Facebook users, who were angry that the company experimented on them without their knowledge.

This book was published in 2017. I think it is funny that I read this paragraph just on the 24th of March 2018. All during last week, Facebook has been on fire after claims of bad data protection/usage. If you want to read more about the scandal, check out this post from The Guardian. The current events, and the experiment described in the book took me to think about two subjects: the consequences of having free services provided by the company at the cost of using your data, and how the emotions of the people around us affect our own.

The scandal for the sharing of data came to me as no surprise. Just browsing the web and seeing all the directed advertisements tells you that your data is being used. I bet you remember agreeing to Facebook's terms of service and didn't even spending two seconds to read them. Me neither, but the consequences of it soon made themselves visible. All these technology companies that provide a free service need to get an income from somewhere. From where? From selling the data of their users. Now let's be more specific, what do I mean by data? Companies are not allowed to share your name or email address unless you explicitly allow it. Nevertheless, smart algorithms, deep learning, and artificial intelligence have made it possible to map the behavior of a person online and create a pretty accurate profile. Then companies like Facebook or Google sell this profiles to other companies who can then decide what profiles they want targeted for their products. As much as I don't like it, it is the cost of it being free. If not, imagine paying 10 dollars a month for Gmail, or 15 for Facebook. The problem comes when you define the product that they are trying to sell. What if this product is Donald Trump? What if they can buy this information and nudge people to vote for him? Does this become immoral? How would you feel if your profile was one of the targeted ones? Are you ready to start paying for Facebook? Please share your thoughts.

On the other hand, those experiments show something deeper about us humans. We are deeply influenced by the people around us and their emotions. I guess that "you are the average of the 5 people that you hand out the most with", might actually be true. For me though, this only raises more questions. Why do emotions spread like that? Is it pure empathy? Is it a self-serving adjustment to fit in a society? Whatever the answers to those questions are, I think there are a couple of things clear. First, watch yourself since you will have a greater impact on the people around you that you might think. Second, surround yourself with what you want to see in yourself. Society helps shaping a person.

If you want to check out other thoughts that this awesome book has evoked, click on these past posts:

• The Influential Mind Made Me Think #1
• The Influential Mind Made Me Think #2

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