Influencers and emotions: The unexpected designers of thought of our time.

Lately I started to think about how social media is designed, and what role do influencers and users have to play in order to make them constructive spaces for idea exchange. I tried to think about the ecosystem and the existing relationship between these online players and the offline world: How do they influence it? How can we build an ecosystem of virtuous connections? What impediments exist today that does not allow us to build these connections?

The design of our interactions is flawed: They are designed for attention seekers, not quality exchanges.

The design of our platforms influence many things, mostly how information is consumed and spread, how we show acceptance or rejection to other peoples ideas, but also how we feel, specially when it comes to issues that we are passionate about. What has been attracting my attention is how the way interactions are designed are influencing a specific feeling: Anger.

Probably when you look at your facebook or twitter feed you may notice that messages written in a negative way or using insults get a lot more attention than the ones that talk about good news. It has been this way since for ever, even in online newspapers, we feast on bad news, we discuss them till we get tired of them, hit a dead end, or another horrible…