TED Talks

TED Talks

     TED talks are always very informative & have a thing for opening eyes and eyes.
I recently watched a TED Talk video of Wael Ghonim & his views towards social media. He believes that there are 5 challenges one has to face while being in social media sites. To begin with, let me explain what he meant by these challenges. Challenge one was that "We don't know how to deal with rumours" he says. Rumours change people's mindset sometimes to bad. We let them at times ruin our lives. "We create our own echo chambers" Wael explained as the second challenge. On social media there's a mute button & a block button. Those two options help us create our echo chamber. We only let people see what we post if they have the same mindset as us. The third challenge is having online discussions becoming angry mobs. At times when you say something that can be taken as a very controversial topic or that you yourself is saying something against what you believe in, it can be a start of an angry mob. Which leads on to the fourth challenge. Challenge number four is that it is very hard to change your opinion on something. When you change your opinion, people start reacting and taking you as a person who is changing sides. Because its either you're with us or you are against us. The last challenge is that social media experiences favours broadcasting over engagements, posts over discussions, shallow comments and not deep ones. "As if we agreed that we are here to talk to each other instead of talking with each other.

     Wael Ghonim believes that the people should liberate the internet. He suggested four different things. The first suggestion was that we should give more incentives to engage in conversations. We shouldn't just be all about the shallow comments. Let's have deep conversations. Suggestion 2 was that we should "make it socially acceptable that we change our minds, or probably even reward that...." and Ghonim has a point. When you say something like, "I hate Donald Trump" on a social media platform and then you start to think that you actually support him, people will criticise that you fancy Trump. (Just an example, not saying I like him or anything.) And I use this example because lately he's a very controversial person due to his actions. The third suggestion was that we should have a matrix that says how many people changed their minds after saying something. This is just like when you get into a fight with a sibling or a parent. At one point you are angry, yell at them, & tell them you hate them. Then next thing you know you are sad because you actually don't hate them. In social media, you can end up liking an activist page then after a while you may realise you actually don't want to change a certain belief or system that the activist and the followers want to achieve. And people should know that that is normal. It is human like to change their minds. Ghonim suggested that we should "probably write more thoughtfully trying to do that, rather than appealing to the people who already agree."

     One should take all of this into consideration before the next time you go onto social media platforms. one by one can make a change. Soon we can all have said we helped out to liberate the internet.