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In world of bubbles, avoid the lure of easy answers
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To say the least, it has been an eventful autumn. Everyday life in India was thrown into turmoil by the sudden demonetization of 85 percent of the nation’s currency in a war against corruption and counterfeit money.
Where did it all go wrong? The past decade has seen a steep rise in data-driven decision making. Surely, this gave everyone, particularly political and business strategists, the arsenal to plot micro-strategies against competitors? Poring over books about the wisdom of crowds, raptly listening to gurus speak about the power of behavioral economics, everyone thought that they had the right tools for the 21st century; only to realize that we had been living in a bubble of our own making.
Before social media took over our lives, people’s views of the world were defined by geography. But the online world deceptively shows what looks like the promise of open, accessible, pervasive knowledge. In reality, what we see is a filtered bubble, where algorithms show us links and stories which are based on the digital profile of our likes, dislikes, friends and purchases. It’s an effect that content creators and marketers capitalize on, even as we unknowingly contribute to it through our opinions, which become more and more rigid in the echo chamber.
It’s a characteristic of our lazy brains that turns complex ideas into easy-to-understand titbits. This is what social media pounces upon. Faced with 24/7 information overload, we retreat to our primal instincts of tribalism and start favoring fast, meme-worthy versions of the truth, and pass them on without doing our due diligence. We forgo our own research before making a purchase, seeking safety in the number of anonymous people who have previously bought an item. We share anecdotes, pictures of others who have bought the same item as ourselves. We revel in shared experiences in the belief that sharing something makes it a universal human truth.
Welcome to the post-truth world. It’s a world in which behavioral marketing profiles the actions of millions of online users in order to determine not only which ads those users will view next, but also push the views of similar users up social media feeds. Businesses believe this gives them insight into the habits and desires of customers, allowing for a deeper level of ad customization.
Such behavioral targeting deploys web analytics, cookies, search and browsing histories, computer applications and IP addresses to generate profiles of individual customers. Using that extensive information, a website’s ad server generates targeted, relevant content which appeals to the interests of the person. Once a person buys a product or a service, the information is used to create an online peer pressure group — “Your friend likes, or has bought, X product and you’ll love it too!”
The norm becomes the truth. The meme becomes the reality. So self-propagating are our belief systems that anything outside the bubble is viewed as heresy, and we develop an ever-growing intolerance for alternative views.
It’s time to stop running with the herd. Which is the only way to avoid getting trampled.
Kunal Sinha has over 25 years of unearthing and commenting on consumer and cultural trends, and helping companies profit from them. Based in Shanghai for over a decade, he is the author of two books about creativity in business: China’s Creative Imperative, and Raw Pervasive Creativity in Asia, and has taught at some of the world’s leading business schools.
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