I wish to advise my friend, Rufai – who knows better and whom I’ve known for at least ten years – to impute less emotions into his daily interventions and to depress our people less. His platform is too strategic for drama. Nigeria has totally transformed since 1974 and is progressing daily. Many Nigerians are taking advantage of our daily evolution and what they need is direction, encouragement, hope. The daily deluge of a potpourri of toxic pessimism, dooms-baiting, negativity bias, is not doing Nigeria any favours in the long run.
We live in an impressionable world, even though literacy has continued to improve the world over – Nigeria inclusive. One of the downsides of social media is the velocity of information being pushed at everyone – information and data that no mind can fully process. Coupled with this velocity is also the fact that most people don’t want to even try to interrogate what they hear and see on all these media; people just accept as true, so long as the information fits their sentiments. Very few interrogate or subject information to careful veracity tests. Most times, we just rush to share rather than ruminate over whether new information is true.
With social media, dogmatism (the art of adopting someone else’s belief) has increased, paradoxically as the world got ‘smarter’. Nigerians top the global chart (according to the World Economic Forum) in terms of the average time that citizens spend on social media. And that is something. AI puts us at fourth position after Kenya, Brazil and South Africa. In each of these countries, people spend just below four hours everyday on social media. Nigeria happens to control the most population in Africa, and it is just about the same population as Brazil, which is a middle-income country. Plot the graph, and Nigeria is a social media time bomb!
