Loneliness of the Interconnected


This excerpt was interesting.  I have never read about a cult before and the beliefs held by Dorothy Martin were strange.  The whole concept of cognitive dissonance is cool.  Cognitive dissonance is defined as a situation in which a person is forced to believe two mutually incompatible ideas at the same time.   A psychologist named Leon Festinger sought to understand what happens at the crisis moment, which is when an immovable object of a core belief comes into conflict with the irresistible force of an undeniable contrary fact.  This is the reason why he chose to study an apocalyptic cult. 

Festinger’s theory was based upon the assumption that cognitive dissonance is very uncomfortable for humans.  When confronted with pain, humans attempt to resolve it with whatever mechanisms are at hand.  The implications of this issue can be shifted to today too because it happens in modern day as well and not just in 1955 when this case study happened.

Today, humans seek shelter from the harsh information that “carves away our cherished beliefs by finding other people who share our convictions.  People like to surround themselves with others that hold the same beliefs and have the same opinions.  With technology so advanced today and only getting better, our interconnections has increased with almost no bound.  People are able to communicate with anyone around the world and so easily too thanks to technology.  “With this tremendous interconnectedness comes the ability to build many more social ties, to weave a vaster web of personal bonds than ever before.”  This means that the internet gives us much more raw social material than ever before to help us strengthen our beliefs and prejudices. 

The internet’s vast interconnectivity makes it possible for everyone to hear everyone else and to be heard by everyone.  “This is perhaps the most important and radical change wrought by digital information.  Every single person hooked up to the web can instantly reach every other person.  Your audience is potentially the world.”  I never thought about the internet in that way but it is true.  The internet can be very powerful!  A bad idea or a wrong piece of information can spread at the speed of light through the internet and quickly find a home among a different but interconnected group of true believers.  This group acts as a reservoir for the bad idea, which could be dangerous because no matter how bad the idea is or how wrong a piece of information is, it becomes more solidly established among the group of people that truly believe it.

              

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