Solutions

Information is ubiquitous. There’s some that describes our understanding of our physical reality-many people agree on ideas in science. But the understanding of the human society differs a lot according to the awareness and access of information and opportunities. And the internet is a massive library dedicated mostly to the wide range of perspectives from people around the world, ideas, opportunities and identities. Some information online includes intentional lies or unintentional lies-which often makes information less reliable. Suppose, if some website asked me to do a long survey online while I just really wanted to get to something I wanted, I might do the survey carelessly and it might record an incorrect representation of my perspectives. Sometimes, I might like to take a survey but halfway through I get bored and give random answers. Maybe, sometimes I’m in a bad mood or I don’t like the surveying website, I might end up giving intentional lies. Sometimes, the surveys I take may not ask the questions that I would have really wanted to answer. Such phenomenon, increases uncertainty in public information and misrepresents public psychology. But it is often the case that a lot information that can be collected online to help policy makers, stakeholders and every member of the society, understand our societies; ourselves, is never collected. Computer programming is a global hit. But the tools that-computer programming and psychology put together yield is yet underappreciated. Information sharing is all around the web but understanding what the information means or what the online behavior or representation of people’s perspectives mean has not been the cool thing to do. With our advancement in writing better algorithms, regression and relational analysis have become more accurate in detecting and describing relationship between different variables. While the real world situations, have a lot of variables, we’ve seen great advancements in algorithms describing complex real world scenarios. By designing clever algorithms, programming can help us understand our societies and get unbiased answers. For example, a lot of websites use cookies to track user activity. But the next step would be to design interactive websites, that while on the one hand provide better user experience; also allow the user to interact with the media while keeping track of the user mobility. The better we can take surveys without letting the user know it’s a survey-of course we do want to appreciate and respect use privacy, the better we can understand ourselves. An example of that could be-with collaboration with Facebook, we could put up a TED talk video on some people’s feed, without them subscribing. Let’s see how many people take a moment to play the video, or how many react to the video and see who those people are; so that we have a better idea about how well communities like TED have been doing in global learning, and how we could do better. Sharing such stuff on people’s feed can also really help spread awareness regarding awesome opportunities like TED. Another such idea could be-to record the time a person waits before skipping an online advertisement, and relate to what those advertisement advertise with who the people are. A fun idea could be that-Facebook starting to give friend suggestions to people that don’t belong in the same country, and see how many people and who actually make friends
each day one friend suggestion includes a different foreigner. Another idea would be Youtube with its user history, informing Youtube Channels of institutions and communities of better ways to make their informative channels more appealing with information about the content of most preferred channels and videos. Yet another idea would be-from the downloads from google play store and apple store, interpret who use what kind of apps. Another cool idea might be to display a community tackling global problem each day in social media feed and see who want to connect to such communities. We could also analyze the popularity of games together with the popularity of the soundtracks they use, and get a sense of mood of people-maybe like a genre or something. There are so many awesome clever ways to study human behavior online. It could be a great idea to start online courses about online anthropology. To deploy clever techniques to collect data and collect data from a diverse range of networks, we can partner with social networks to collect the data, and designers to better design data collection techniques. And all of those collaboration would work with a non-profit international organization dedicated solely to collecting and understanding social data. The organization would work with other organizations seeking data, healthcare or education to help them make better choices about their leadership. There are different organization that collect data for healthcare, education or other purposes-like UN collects a lot of data, but an organization dedicated solely to understand user behavior for a social welfare could be way visionary and powerful in helping public policy represent the unbiased information of the society. The way it can be done with startups and existing business companies is through the data collaborations. Counting the numbers have been common these days. But we want to study the identity of people who do a certain thing online. Further ahead we want to study the relationship between people’s identities and what they do online. Of course, all of this involves respecting privacy policies of companies and user privacy. But I think it’s a great time to analyze user activity to help understand our societies and use information to support global and local communities and policymakers, get unbiased idea of our society. It’s time psychologists and data scientists get together for an awesome analysis of modern anthropology in the internet. It’s time we started appreciating the power of online anthropology. Let's understand the digital representation of our real world!