People are constantly influenced by their surrounding and other people around them in their decision making. This is the fact of life for many centuries. Call it osmosis or institutionalization or mores of a society (stone age to modern civilization), people do not make their decisions in isolation – no matter how important or trivial the decisions are.
My first car in America was VW Fox – my friend Matt Guernsey helped me in making a decision to buy it – at a Seven Eleven shop in Pontiac, Michigan for $2000. Until that point, I never heard of Volkswagen.
My father and mother have influenced me to take up engineering and technology right from my 6th grade and that led me to become an engineer. The three universities I applied for my Masters were chosen based on three personal connections I had in those universities.
We all have forced and inadvertent influencer’s in our lives. Over the centuries, the art of influencing has moved from inadvertent methods to forced and intentional techniques. Mass market outlets such as televisions, newspapers, banner posters and radio have used influencer’s to sway our decision making in a particular direction.
How does inadvertent influencing happen? – I guess as the name sounds, you get influenced by someone who you look up to and try to emulate them or follow in similar paths.
Am sure Columbus or Vasco da Gama were influenced by someone in their society to take up sailing/exploration to distant lands. I am sure Shakespeare was influenced by his distant uncle or a contemporary poet. Most of musician’s kids gets influenced by their parents to take up music and dance.
Then, what about forced or intentional influencing? For lack of better, this is equivalent to constant brain washing – directly or indirectly. Through mass media outlets, leveraging celebrity and experts to influence has been the biggest side serving of 19th and 20th century technological innovations.
There are common characteristics for these two influencers – these two are very unstructured. Both of them leverage emotional capital while the earlier version has higher personal touch to it.
Enter Structured Influencing ……
With the advent of Internet, Web and infinite sources of information, data and access, we are moving towards structured and impersonal influencing ……one has access to oodles of statistics, metrics, reviews, and information to make their decisions – via the web – no matter how trivial or crucial the decision is. Whether you shop at Amazon or Netflix or watch at YouTube or Hulu or plan your evening via Yelp or CitySearch – collective knowledge and experience can suggest you the best options based on wisdom of crowds.
Out goes the personal touch and emotional capital in influencing ….how bad or good is this? What are the long term sociological implications of impersonal influencing?
Ideation and Opportunities of Improvement -
While there is lot of information on the web, its time to qualify that for better decision making. Reviews on Amazon or Netflix or Youtube are good but who is rating or keeping track of the reviewers and the quality of reviews they offer?
Reviews have rating and ranking but I have not seen reviewers with similar yard stick. Filtering the reviews by the quality/rating/ranking of the reviewers is also very important.
