Your Own Custom Bubble — The Not-So-Social Media

Lets be very clear with one thing, we all have our own confirmation bias and we all need validation. For those who don’t know, confirmation bias is your existing thoughts on some topic for which you look for supporting data.

Our desperate need to get validation for confirmation biases leads us to social media platforms. We log in there just to get that sweet validation. Anyone who gives us that validation, supporting evidences that support our confirmation biases, instantly becomes the person who we look up to. We visit them repeatedly and even start considering them as our virtual voice, create a para social relation with them and even are ready to defend them in front of others.

Anyone who challenges our confirmation biases, shows evidences that are contrary to our beliefs, becomes our arch enemy. We instantly find it convenient to allot a label to them and discredit their evidences, no matter how credible they may be. We hardly bother to check authenticity of those evidences that validate our confirmation biases, however, any contrary evidence faces harshest scrutiny, and person presenting such evidences also has to go through tough tests to prove its veracity, repeatedly.

Our lust for getting validation to our confirmation biases is very known to the social media platforms. That is why, each platform is trained to create a bubble around us. They rigorously track our interactions, what we find comforting, what we like, what we engage with and so many other parameters. They train their algorithm to only show us such content so that we can be comfortably spend hours in their platforms inside our own bubble.

If you want to test this theory, just have a look at your social media feed. How many people do you follow who post exactly what you agree with and how many are there who post things challenging your biases. If you have a lot of the former and a very few of the latter, then you are living inside a custom created bubble by the social media platform.

How to break this bubble? Well, its pretty simple. Start following those who repeatedly challenge your opinions. I am not sure that you start agreeing with them. Keep scrutinizing their thoughts and ideas and also scrutinize those things that you agree with.

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