The internet has given us the access to experience other people’s lives like ours never before. Hundreds of items flash through our newsfeed in social media and are building our cognitive biases even without we knowing. It is subconsciously impacting us and our deep sensibilities. A novice investor in Ahmedabad has access to Warren Buffet’s hundreds of videos and articles. A student in a small village in India can learn fundamentals of marketing from a Wharton School professor in one of the MOOCs. An aspiring filmmaker would watch only videos about how Nolan makes films. An economic researcher searching for insights on the internet, digging it from published reports of the Big Four is forgetting one point: A single statistic won’t tell you the whole story. Context is a combination of various factors which an algorithm might miss, but a sharp observer with common sense can realize. Our experience now is to consume content which is far from our own reality. We listen to music which is far from our cultural sensibilities. We have food which is strange to our bodies. We watch House of Cards on Netflix, sitting at our ancestral home in a small town in India. Are we creating a strangely awesome environment which has no relevance to our immediate realities? It certainly helps us to escape from our mundane things in life. The dopamine from the internet is constant and it helps us to reject the immediate reality and swap it with a life in a brighter promising world. We all love to say, the whole world is now a global village. What matters is the context. It is unique. The legal framework, the culture, how people perceive things are so unique in each geography. In Kerala, where I live, we jokingly say that each 50 miles, dialect, attitude and the way people look at things, changes. The state is hardly 500 miles long. So imagine the world divided by multi-million factors. So being aware of the context is an imperative to deal with an ever-increasing complex world. Messing with context can lead to consequences. We are punished not because of our actions, but by our actions, told my friend on a phone call, I found it a profound statement. That statement has no sense of entitlement, it is making ourselves accountable for what we do. Being aware of our own realities can help us to deal with it better than trying to block it with digital sugar. So only thing which matters is the context, and how you work on it and the results you want from it.
