The importance of influences in your feed, through the lens of psychology

It’s been said that mastering a skill takes up to ten years. The social media has been around about that long but are we near mastering it?

Naturally, everybody don’t hop onto the new bandwagon instantly and the idea behind social media has changed during that time and still, it’s evolving and finding it’s meaning, it’s own path.
Although, what drives the growth of a social media, really is a simple bandwagon effect.

The once close circle of only our friends and family has taken a global scale and the information flows seemingly non-stop, carrying in itself all kinds of sort entertainment that nails us behind the screens day and day out. We consume, we are the consumers of all that information, and sometimes, it’s worth taking a step back and seeing that river flowing before us, rather than us within it.

Your feed shows many different things about you. From there, it’s easy to see what do you like, what interests you, which writers are your favorite and so on. Practically, one could profile you very accurately based on what or who you are following and what attributes they’re bringing into the game, and what influences, into you.
There is a correlation between who you are, and what contents you consume daily.
That’s exactly why, in my opinion, is very important to stay on top of the feed and to let only good influences reach your consciousness.

The flow of information is a river, but it could also be taken as a well, where the water seemingly never runs out, and it tastes just as you’d expect it to taste. Sometimes, unfortunately, reality is not as beautiful reflection as that, and more than often, our feeds have become piled up with useless, distracting stressing noise that really doesn’t add any value to our character nor our work and consumes us, rather than enriching our experience. This superfluous information is just like old piece of electronics you haven’t touched for years, but still walk past it, see it lying around, sometimes even thinking about getting rid of it.

What’s worse, some of the wells are downright poisonous and push the buttons of our emotions without us noticing. If we create our feeds, the source for news, media, art and inspiration, contents to each of their own liking, carelessly, we’re going to be victims, albeit not so serious, but still victims of our own awarelessness on this topic.

Therefore, the question is, are our feeds with the face of us or are we, with the face of our feeds?

You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.

• Jim Rohn

So, each word carries itself a pretty deep meaning in the context of your brain-set.
When I say, a cat, a kennel, an oak, your mind runs pictures of these words and their placement in the environment that it creates automatically around these words in front of your eyes, or atleast in the back of your eyes. You’ll see these images and the associations they carry along. Pretty simple?
The cat might carry around a mice, a kennel might remind you of a large dog that your grandma used to had and from there on, your grandma, the house that she lived in, the smell of it and so on until you’ll get back onto the main road, the main idea, with these thoughts, emotions and ideas that, taking the mental trip, arose in you.

Onto similar journeys, is your mind taken when scrolling the feed, diving into the information and onto the road to satisfy the hunger for enjoyment, knowledge and so on, whatever one might expect from gaining from social media.
Therefore, being the master of your own feed, you are the creator, or atleast the one who gains control over the images, the roads that your mind takes to, and over the emotions and ideas that it brings back to you.

A simple word can influence you, think about the amount of words that one article contains and about the idea it finally presents. Depending on the similarities of the two opinions, your’s and the author’s, on the topic discussed, a conclusion settles which is the ultimate influence in your thought processes. That’s how it’s easy to be misguided.

There are two effective principles to hold onto when judging your feed, scrolling through it as letting the river pass by in front of your eyes.

1. 80/20. Whatever is that you have a liking for in your feed, measured by usefulness or fulfilness, it comes from the 20% of the articles. Other than that is most-likely noise:

2. The more often you look at data, the more distracting noise you’ll get and the more it eats up the important signal, that you’d effectively catch just by reducing the amount of refreshes of the page per day. That’s one of the main reasons why people lose money on the markets by letting the signal disappear into the noise and, being practically dataless from there on, make wrong moves based on wrong information.

As it is, at the end, the input = the output, so choose your influences carefully.
I hereby make a promise, to keep the feed of my followers on my part, clean and meaningful, as best as I can.
Let’s keep the blockchain practical, useful and enjoyable for all people.

If you’ve enjoyed the writing and hope to see more, follow me.
-Velvet

Picture by geralt from pixabay.com, thanks for the splendid illustration