In 9th grade, I made my most astonishing work of art.
Funnily enough, it wasn’t for any class related to the arts. It was for my statistics class. I created it to answer a simple question: are people happier when they have more friends? To answer that question, my group and I surveyed 240 students. That month, the ink from my printer was running as dry as my body was soaked with sweat from running around the school collecting questionnaires. We compiled all results into a spreadsheet with hundreds of thousands of cells. It was the largest amount of data I had ever handled. I started analyzing it, cell by cell. The method of analysis? A node network graph. It was something new to me at the time and I didn’t know what to expect. The final result was an intensely vivid web of color composed of 240 nodes connected by thousands upon thousands of lines. It was magnificent to behold. It was intensely surreal as I witnessed the abstract concept of friendship manifested in something tangible and visual. This chaotic and hypnotizing mess of dots and lines was a snapshot of the relationships between an entire batch of students! From the graph, I could immediately discern that people aren’t automatically happier if they have more friends. It’s the quality of your friendships that matter. Ever since that project, I have been constantly seeking new ways to make the invisible structures around us visible.
Over the years, this interest has driven me to study the effects of the internet in greater depth. This is because the internet, for the past few decades, has been the biggest black box that our society has ever created. It has been credited for both promoting democracy and blamed for destroying it. It has been praised for spreading information, and decried for spreading misinformation. All of the confusion surrounding what the internet actually is stems mostly from the fact that it’s very hard to see the full extent of how it actually works and how it affects people. Media coverage of Google’s use of data or Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica scandal, services I use every day, have left me wondering how we can improve the internet and make it more transparent for the people who use it.
As a policy-minded thinker and problem solver, I have done a lot of research and contemplation on the current problems and benefits of these platforms and services. I read about how Youtube has served as a platform for populist strongmen. I read about how Facebook enabled the Arab Spring. So far, all that I have learned is that the problem is an incredibly complex and nuanced one, with a lot of different actors and moving parts. It involves multinational companies, governments, and billions of individual users. In order to maximize the potential of these networks and minimize their harms, we have to be tactical in our approach. From figuring out data privacy to figuring out whether these companies are platforms or basic services, almost all aspects of the role of these networks fascinate me. It is also a topic that I have debated competitively in the past. I have participated in motions ranging from “This house would ban Google from retaining search data” to “This house believes news media outlets should use AI for the production and presentation of its news content”. I am highly invested in the role of social networks in today’s society; rather than their complexity pushing me away, it is what draws me in.
The costs of not understanding social networks in this era is incredibly high. This is why I am willing to dedicate myself to studying it and uncovering the ways of how to deal with it.