YOUR YEAR AHEAD
What the stars hold for you in 2021
THE NETFLIX DOCUMENTARY
THE SOCIAL DILEMMA highlighted the problem perfectly: social media platforms and smartphones are designed to be addictive, to keep our eyeballs glued to the screens, in order to ‘harvest’ our attention and sell the data to advertisers.
‘Conspiracy theories have been, and will always be, humanity’s attempt to understand the world by connecting unrelated dots without substantiation,’ says Nazareen Ebrahim, artificial intelligence ethics expert and CEO of the media and communications company Socially Acceptable. ‘Social media is a distribution platform – easy, free, instant, uncontrolled and inviting – that helps to amplify wondering voices into threads stretching across boundaries, timelines and cultures. Fear and wonder work hand in hand, and the ability of social media to turn every moving, talking or singing thing into an overnight “celebrity” has opened the floodgates for anything to be given credence as truth or reasonable consideration. This unfortunate way of looking at the world has made intellectual curiosity an exception rather than the norm. Closed forums, encouraged by sites like 4chan and 8chan, certainly breed the most dangerous sort of human being, but social media platforms amplify the conversations or thoughts allowed on those platforms. The fine line between censorship and freedom of speech must be interrogated daily.’