The Power of an Independent Mind in the Digital Space
Years ago, before the arrival of the internet, people had to rely on the media houses for information. However, this mode of getting information indirectly gave some sort of psychological advantage to these organizations, and granted them the ability to steer the opinion of their avid readers as they deemed right, something I termed a stealth attack on the mind.
The birth of the internet introduced a completely different perspective to this, which while abating the organizations advantage, granted more to persons that harbored similar thoughts. The intriguing thing about this is the fact that it does not require expert-level technical skills, rather a form of social engineering on unsuspecting victims.
Solomon E. Asch was a world-renowned American Gestalt psychologist and pioneer in social psychology. He became famous in the 1950s, following experiments which showed that social pressure can make a person say something that is obviously incorrect. The way he did this was through an experiment in which participants were shown a card with a line on it, followed by another card with 3 lines on it labeled a, b, and c. The participants were then asked to say which line matched the line on the first card.
The first in line to answer gave the wrong answer. Shortly after, the following participants all gave the same wrong answer. Solomon Asch thought that the majority of people would not conform to something obviously wrong, but the results showed that an alarming number of participants gave the wrong answer.
- mind-development.eu
An independent mind is the ultimate resistance to this form of social engineering, because it lives based on its own moral code and values, based on what it views as right and wrong which stems from a core of principles and years of character building embedded into it.
The independent mind does not pride its value solely based on the approval of others, rather from its ability to make decisions based its own principles.
In this digital age, people notoriously yearn for new content and this loophole is endlessly exploited by malicious actors. Little wonder the popular messaging platform, WhatsApp, had to incorporate a forwarded label in order to curb the spread of fake news and propaganda done on the platform.
Truth is, there’s only so much the engineers that build these platforms can do, rather, responsibility lies on its users to curb it, such of which can only be achieved through the independent mind; the inquisitive mind which notices patterns and questions them, which takes decisions void of influence created from propaganda.
