Opinion Industry is worth billions of dollars since days of yore. It’s a serious hardcore business as it can make or break an entire nation across the globe and rightly so, given the impact it has on janta janardhan. Unfortunately, this industry is run by a few with extreme point of views and they never truly represent majority population in real sense and spirit. So, statistically speaking, this unstructured data is always skewed because participation by janta is never 100%
Adding to the chaos is the increasing number of social networking platforms enabling expression of these opinions openly and without moderation. Also, social media exploit the basic human need to impress which can further make opinions conveniently manipulated to suit the zeitgeist of popular narrative at that point in time. We all love validation in the form of likes, comments, shares, clicks – It is what it is – nature of the beast.
Privileged ones who are running this opinion mill since ages easily give lengthy sermon saying that solution to all of it is making everyone voice their opinion. But, up until 1991 – people were so busy earning a living and all their focus was on putting bread on their table. Opinions on any subject occupied less than 10% of their heart and head space. Only post 1991, slowly the wealth security or call it financial freedom seeped in, thereby empowering more people to voice their views on topics that went beyond the realm of livelihood
Also, pre social media era, access to mass media was not affordable by aam janta. So, it’s plain common sense that opinions should not be taken to heart and definitely not at face value. Opinions by a few active activists can’t work for all especially given the diversity of our population. Sadly, same opinions can even make someone president of the most powerful country on our globe – Let that sink in so that we understand the gravity of its power when the game is played right.
Social media basically shifts that power into our hands at personal level. We morons are failing to understand the cliché that with great power comes greater responsibility. We are playing the game so frivolously thereby again enabling the very few to dictate the mood and meaning of everything happening around. Many a times – happenings are fabricated and we just fall prey to it. We are so rigid with our views primarily derived by some influencer that we are closed completely to other varied voices of dissent.
This limits our own thinking capacity as we keep on recycling what we already know or try to fit into popular narrative or oppose it just for the heck of it to sound intelligent as we are conditioned to think that voice of dissent must be a gyani. Point is we lack our own opinion that comes from within genuinely – we wait to latch on to something popular or unpopular. This is a huge disservice to one’s own self.
All brands are crazy about personalization including giants such as Google and Amazons of the world. Personally, immense love and respect towards Google for all its contribution to make our life simple. Flip side is, if it keeps on giving what we want in search result page then we become victim of filter bubble concept. Job of any search engine or website is to give every opinion or a product fair chance to appear in front of its audience and allow them to decide for themselves.
For all you know, opinions might get molded once one sees the range of products or views. As cliché goes, Change is the only constant. More we are exposed to wide gamut of things/emotions/products/views – more we become flexible and adaptive + slowly rest assured of our own true choices/feelings/ views. Authenticity of words improve and that’s what world needs & wants.