Sinan Aral Transcript

Sinan Aral, director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Initiative on the Digital Economy, wears multiple hats – foremost as a scientist with deep knowledge of analytics and machine learning but also as a hands-on entrepreneur and investor. He is a professor of management, marketing, IT, and data science at MIT and also the best-selling author of “The Hype Machine: How Social Media Disrupts Our Elections, Our Economy, and Our Health–And How We Must Adapt.” A first-generation Turkish immigrant Sinan grew up in Atlanta and worked as a bartender and crew on a yacht before he “got serious” and went to MIT in pursuit of his Ph.D., which opened the door not only to his current groundbreaking academic research but also into entrepreneurism and venture capital investment. “I’m a data nerd scientist who has experience building businesses in the real world,” says Sinan. “I was always extremely interested in technology and its effects on society. That’s really what’s driven me intellectually for the last three decades.”

About the genesis of “The Hype Machine: How Social Media Disrupts Our Elections, Our Economy, and Our Health–And How We Must Adapt”.

Sinan first started exploring the influence of social media in 2000, when internet platforms like Facebook and Twitter weren’t even yet in existence. He sought to understand the structure of these networks and how information flows through them from person to person. What are the impacts on productivity? Is it possible to create large-scale statistical analyses of information diffusion and its implications? Those questions are more relevant today than ever– and more urgent. What are the sources and impacts of false news? What are the impacts on the human condition, particularly in light of a public health event such as a pandemic?

Since those early social media iterations back at the turn of the millennium a love-hate dynamic has developed between the opportunities these platforms offer in terms of democratization of communications and their demonstrable risks. “There’s peril there,” says Sinan. “And what my book is about is what causes the peril. How do we achieve the promise and avoid the peril?” In his view, how we adapt, use, and regulate this technology will determine our global outcomes.

Entering the Metaverse: At a crossroads and figuring it out.

The concept of the Metaverse is moving quickly into the mainstream imagination. It’s defined as the layering of information on top of our actual reality. The vehicles are AR (augmented reality) and VR (virtual reality), which rely upon different technologies. AR can be easily accessed with a smartphone while VR requires more cumbersome headset devices. Another distinction: AR enhances both the virtual and real worlds while VR only enhances a fictional reality. Whatever the means, says Sinan, as the technology evolves and becomes more seamless so, too, will simulate reality’s reach. In the not-so-distant future, he believes the technology will extend beyond playing games into working and social environments of all kinds. How do we regulate monopolies in this space? What do we think about mergers and acquisitions? What do we think about fake news and manipulation? That’s all going to bleed right into the Metaverse and it’s all going to affect the internet that we have for tomorrow. “I would say we’re at a crossroads,” predicts Sinan. “What we do know is really going to have a big effect in the years to come.”

Potential Impacts of convergence in the Metaverse and crypto space:

The blockchain chain, NFTs, and crypto space, in general, have the potential to completely reshape the way organizations are structured and interact. Sinan can imagine a future in which organizations morph into a massive collective of individuals who don’t necessarily have any specific affiliation other than membership and voting rights, recognized perhaps through ownership of a token or access to some sort of contractual right or obligation in an NFT or a smart contract. The advent of today’s fast-evolving gig economy could be a forerunner to a mass wave of decentralization and entirely new ways of operating. We are in a period of extreme workplace disruption right now and it’s not just because of the crypto or virtual worlds. Pandemic has accelerated trends toward contract and remote work and flexible hours. Certain face-to-face services, like restaurant staff, may be relatively unaffected. But for many millions, it will be essential to retool. Web 3.0 has tremendous potential to change the way that we lead, work and communicate with each other. I would say that the next 20 years of work is going to experience significantly more disruption than the last 20 years,” says Sinan, not only because of the rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and automation but also because of the ancillary waves of impacts on the workforce. “(AI) is creating skills-biased technical change in the labor force. It’s automating certain jobs. It’s creating new jobs,” he says, “(and) humans have to reskill to be skilled enough to do those new jobs. So it’s sending shockwaves through the organization of work and through the labor market.”

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Your attachment to devices and apps? It’s by design.

Sinan explains the lens through which his book, “The Hype Machine: How Social Media Disrupts Our Elections, Our Economy, and Our Health–And How We Must Adapt,” examines social media impacts, including the neuroscientific, economic, sociological, and business implications. He explains that humans have the brain capacity to process complex social cues better and faster than any other species, with plenty of room to spare, which explains why “the meteoric rise of social media is … like throwing a lit match into a pool of gasoline.” We were ready for this evolutionarily. The social media economy is based on an engagement economy, so the platforms’ profit incentive is to keep users engaged, reinforced by the hit of dopamine they receive every time they receive a “like,” comment, or share. The resulting endorphins provide a positive shock to our mental state and then wane, stimulating withdrawal and the need for … more. “And so that is what keeps us coming back,” says Sinan. “When you combine that with what’s known as a variable reinforcement schedule, where the pings on our phone or the lights lighting up on our phone can come at any moment, now we are always thinking about our phone, thinking ‘When is the next “like” going to come? When is the next comment going to come? Now you’ve really got us hooked.” And beware: Twitter, Insta, and Facebook aren’t the only culprits. Work-related tools like Slack and LinkedIn are among other popular social media platforms whose drives and imperatives are fundamentally the same.

Misinformation spreads as quickly as our human desire to be “in the know.”

For his research, Sinan received unusually open access to Twitter data from 2006 to 2017, within which he and his team found significant insights. They studied the spread of true versus false information, recreating what is known as “Twitter cascades” – how true and false stories actually spread in real-time. “What we found was extremely shocking. We found that false news diffused farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than the truth in every category of information that we studied,” he says. False political news was the most viral “by far.” The reason why is both fascinating and easy to understand: People like novelty, sharing tidbits of interest that might attract other people’s attention, perhaps generating retweets. Sinan’s examination of the data revealed that false news was 70% more likely to be retweeted than fact-based information. Sinan attributes this to the “Novelty Hypothesis,” a cognitive science-based theory that human attention is drawn to new things in the environment. It explains why propaganda is so effective. The spread of misinformation is one of a host of issues that Sinan believes must be addressed going forward. Whether it’s the outsized (and corrosive) impact of bots or the breakdown of civil conversation at our polarized holiday dinner tables, he says, it’s critical that we collectively consider how to regulate the market concentration of social media and big tech platforms; which circumstances justify legislating protections around bots; and how to balance free speech versus harmful speech on the internet. “The future of the Internet is about what choices we make,” warns Sinan. “And the big question on everybody’s mind is, to what extent … (are) these algorithms tearing us apart?”

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The #1 challenge for organizations right now is how to attract and retain talent. Organizations are stuck in old ways of thinking about work and they are struggling! In my new PDF, I outline 7 ways the workforce is changing and what you and your organization need to do to adapt. The Great Resignation is The Great Opportunity if you are willing to take action! Click here to download the PDF.

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