The Era of Narratives

It’s been 15 days since I moved out of Facebook as part of a trial run at digital detoxification. My news-feeds were filled with lot of information, majority of them going on top of my head. With the overload of continuous information all around I decided to bite only as much as I could chew and hence walked away from the platform . Here I try to introspect on what Facebook has turned in to and how it will evolve in the foreseeable future.

Platforms like Facebook used to be a place where discussions on social, political and policy issues used to happen in parallel, alongside quite a lot of other stuffs, with individuals sharing their opinions based on the facts they could process with the available information in the public sphere. And this helped the ones in power to know the pulse on the ground and worked as a feedback mechanism.

As the platform expanded and the masses jumped in to the ship in large numbers, the potential of the once considered as feed back mechanism, to be an influencer of the public perception, was acknowledged by the centres who held positions of power. And with the way Facebook has rearranged it’s algorithms to recommend posts that suits your interest, this potential grew exponentially. And then unfolded the third gen potential of the platform and I prefer to call this era of social media wars as ‘The Era of Narratives’.

And when the way, elections are fought and movie promotions are done largely on social media, was widely accepted, political parties or movies became products that needs to be sold to a customer, the voters/audience. And to sell a product, marketing played a crucial role and in today’s world Marketing is less about the stuff you make and more about the stories you tell. And that is exactly where this new framework of Narrative building came in.

Stories being the manifestations of truth and the public being receptive if the story engages them, even at the cost of facts, storytelling became a dangerous power to have. Stories were told at the behest of the one who wanted it to be told and the users who once formed opinions based on facts, then on cooked up facts and afterwards based on opinions of the influencers and intellectuals, now started blindly believing the stories. The prominence of truth somewhere in the process subsided to the comfortable narratives.

At this point of time when we have paid and unpaid groups to uphold the narratives they were fed by god knows who, even when you possess the tech to verify facts and figures a click away and form an opinion of your own,

it is no wonder that the discourse in social media and generally in the real world has stooped down to unimaginable limits. Given that, I am interested to see how these social media platforms will evolve in the years to come or if it will actually see a downfall and finally cease to exist.

What are your thoughts on the future of social media platforms like Facebook ? Will a better equipped platform take over the already existing ones? DO let me know your thoughts on this please.