By Jackie Batamuliza
When you are on social media, it’s easy to misconceive the breadth of the value or potency of the platforms available to us.
Beyond commerce,motivation, education and information (of which the latter three are largely received than given especially in developing countries) sicial media could largely pass as a bank of human emotions.
We read happiness,anxiety, anger, hate, joy and every other feeling for 365 days of the year.
The calculation i don’t think we give much attention is the actual scientific political and social meaning of this.
Reading from the minimal attention majority of our society applies to the humanity employed in sieving what ought to be said and what shouldn’t be, there is general negligence on our side in aiding people to appreciate the magnitude of the value of information in our time.
The twenty first century wars are preceded by something as minute as character before firearms are picked.They could be institutional, individual, cultural, social political character and behaviour.
When a nation falls people will be tweeting yet the button that started the road to firearms was with a couple of letters on a certain smart phone.
May be the person who started the fight could have done better to avoid the dangers but they just had no full view or the picture of the whole power grid in which their joke became the spark that collapsed the roof over their own head.
But that’s how the poweful nations survive, they do so by exploiting tiny little loopholes and the shortcomings of other nations which often just multiply if the people themselves aren’t in fully in charge.
Domestically we may fight over as many things as there may be but it’s vital to be aware that we are no longer alone neither are we the nationals or Africans or Asians that have interest in the affairs of their countries.
It’s why sofisticated institutions such as Same side, GovBrain,SCL Group,605 among many others with similar art of work exist. Cambridge Analytica belonged to this same league before the Facebook- Cambridge Analytica data scandal in 2018.
How ethical their work really is remains a question of how well we each know and understand International competition.
We can’t have our social media handles for petty purposes and keep hoping that we will do better than the 70s generations or that our countries can survive the twenty first century imperial political operations and It doesn’t matter which political divide one is on we all get to live the consequences as history has shown.
The survival of nations in the twenty first century is about how accepting or well aware of the meaning of social and political software and its value in our times and that comes down to international political competition.
When facebook cautions a user or decides what is acceptable and what’s not, it is simply replicating the role our guardian and parents played when we were growing up. We now have a global family and these handles are being the parents or technically the crews referred to as fact checkers are the new world parents to our consciousness. This is all leading to a certain direction that only the designers are fully aware of.
However, the exam for all of us is in the politics that has to preceed that. That is where we all have to rely on each other’s understanding of what it means to be a citizen of a certain country.
The author is an International Relations Analyst
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