Bubble, bubble, bubble: how much the society of content consumption for relevance makes us more closed and unavailable to dialogue.

Recently, during a Specialization class that I taught to a highly engaged group at UFBA, a discussion emerged that transcended our communication, marketing and branding content and embraced even broader and even philosophical discussions: understanding that we live in a world with an excess of stimuli and a production of content and intense communication, evaluating and selecting the relevance of what we will consume becomes increasingly important.

From this perspective, digital platforms play a decisive role in all of this, bringing a character that has been the hot topic in digital marketing discussions: the ALGORITMO.

Basically, it understands what the person likes to consume, and delivers more and more of that same type of content to them, so that what they receive is increasingly relevant from their individual perspective, with the goal that the content is always interesting and consequently, making her spend more and more time inside the platform. It’s a vicious cycle of consumption – delivery of highly personalized content – more consumption and so on.

But what’s the problem with all this? We are each day closing ourselves more and more in our little digital bubbles. If we only receive what we like to consume, where are the other perspectives? So it is. They don’t. And so, we end up closing our vision and making it increasingly obtuse and focused on a single point of view.

As a consequence, we have a society that is less open to dialogue – because it simply stops practicing it – and that closes itself in its own guidelines and bubbles, which are getting smaller every day.

As Lulu would say: this is how humanity walks… but where is this journey taking us? Will we become less tolerant, more closed off and reclusive in our clusters of friends who only agree with us? Where is the debate? Where is the clash of ideas?

In a world of bubbles, polarity only tends to increase, and tolerance tends to decrease… how do we puncture this bubble? May we reflect on this and increasingly be willing to transcend these barriers that only distance us and diminish our ability to argue, debate, know other points of view, learn from each other and consequently evolve as people and as a society.

By: Maria Brasil