How Does Internet Information Affect Our Decisions?

Focus Photography of Keyboard by Kacper Cybinski.

Studies would prove that our decisions could be influenced by internet information – there is a rising number of influencers in social media (e.g. Youtube, Facebook, and Twitter). Information that we consider fact (or true) is the most influential when it comes to decision making. This topic is timely because, day today we are making decisions, and day to day we are bombarded by information that could be factual or fake; important or insignificant. 

Information can be used to influence the decisions of people. That is, you could be making decisions based on the influence of media (video, photo, article and etc.) that was engineered based on your data. If you are not familiar with data modeling (or should we call it also information modeling), it is the science of testing data; it is used to know which data affects one data. Questions like: 

“If you increase your advertisement (ads) on Facebook will your followers grow?” 

The data that will be used to answer this problem is the number of ads on Facebook and the number of followers. Then, the collected data will be analyzed using statistical tools (apps). If statistical results are positive, then you can decide to continue to air the ads on Facebook since it has a positive effect on the number of your followers. 

Knowledge of data can also be used in a bad way. For example, let say that data test shows that people tend to select strong leaders when the number of violent news increase. During an election, the said information could be used by a candidate by building strong-alpha male images and spreading violent news on the internet (and in television); usually they are in the form of articles, memes, photos, and videos. The people who are being targeted by the said information would be influenced that the world is full of violence even though there is no enough data or statistical evidence to prove the claim. As a result of media exposure, people could jump into the conclusion that their country needs a strong-alpha male leader because the world is full of violence. 

In defense of the above example and realistically speaking, there are negative events in this world, but there are positive as well, thus, one cannot conclude or isolate that the world is negative alone (and one cannot also isolate that the world is positive alone). The point is that one person should not jump into conclusions based on a few pieces of evidence.

There is a tendency for people to believe based on what they are seeing rather than in statistics – people might not distinguish the difference between “trending” and “pressing” issues (trending topics does not mean that they are the most pressing issues in a country). For example, do trending stories about celebrities more important than issues that relate to the leading cause of death in a country? Would you be more concerned about the social life of celebrities than information that would help extend your life expectancy? Would you be more concerned about the trending beautiful faces of celebrities than the information that could help you regain your health, which could then result in you to have healthier skin? 

Internet (and television) tends to feed us with information that we “like”. If we like violence and hate speech, then the internet will make sure that we see more of this in our feeds every day. If you like celebrities, then your feeds will be full of celebrities. Internet feeds (social media) are designed to show us what we like, not what the world is really like.