PONY PLANET -- Today Pony Planet is more akin to a planet of sheep than to a planet of horses - we are all followers. Independent thought has been systematically scraped away. Et la pièce de résistance? Nobody even noticed. One can only imagine that before the global connectivity we face today, opinions came from events that individuals witnessed themselves. Moments in time which people saw and then interpreted in their own way. In the modern world it is impossible to be everywhere at once and so we must rely on the media to stay up to date. The problem is a middleman is introduced. Someone who does the research, the witnessing and even the interpreting for you.
It is through this middleman that individual thought and logic is stripped away. We see it all the time on social media, that which is the most divisive and which elicits the most emotional response, is shown everywhere. Social media contains algorithms which seek to boost engagement and keep you hooked as is explored in the documentary The Social Dilemma. It is for this reason that so many fall victim to this sensationalisation - everyone sees news that aligns with their views. Thanks to the global nature of our modern world and our aforementioned reliance on others to interpret news, we must build our truths from what we see online. What we see online however, is controlled, distorted, and cherry picked by an algorithm. It is in this way we are made to believe whatever truth is convenient. How can we detect bias in our media if the only media we ever get is biased?
This is how independence has been stripped away, and how we have become nothing more than a herd of sheep, aimlessly wandering towards the next post. Nobody seems to notice that their opinions can be traced back to a tweet they read. Or an instagram story, or a video or a TikTok - the list goes on. I was never truly aware of this until I wrote down all the media I accessed in a day. Awareness, which is currently non-existent, may help alleviate this issue, and could possibly be the only step able to be taken. As, in a world as vast and connected as ours, what is the alternative, how could you possibly stay informed in any other way?