Politics and Technology of Control: Introduction
January 29
The Internet at its core is simply an expression of a technological protocol that allows for a particular way of sharing information. But from its humble beginnings the Internet has always felt like more than this. The Net has great potential for “good” (e.g. innovation, economic growth, education, and access to information), and likewise is a great platform for the bawdy, tawdry and illegal. So is this platform about fundamental social, political and economic change, or about access to solipsistic blogging, pornography, cheap pharmaceuticals, free music, and poker at home? This question leads us to a host of interesting issues that weave their way through the course related to openness, access, regulatory control, free speech, anonymity, intellectual property rights, democracy, transparency, norms and values, economic and cultural change, and cyber-terrorism, as well as scamsters and thieves.
Preparation (Assignment "Zero")
- Reflect on what you believe are the most significant social, cultural, political or economic changes associated with the spread of digital technologies. In a few sentences, please offer 2-3 examples in the Class Discussion section below and be prepared to discuss them during class.
Readings/Watchings
- Ethan Zuckerman, History of the Internet (approx. 6 minutes, watch all)
- Jonathan Zittrain, How the Internet Works (approx. 4 mins., watch all)
- Eszter Hargittai, The Digital Divide and What to Do About It (New Economy Handbook) (focus on Sections I-III)
- Hargittai’s data is from 2003. For more recent data, see Pew Internet & American Life Project, Digital Differences 2012 (read intro, skim the sections).
- Rebecca MacKinnon, Let’s Take Back the Internet! (TED.com) (approx. 15 mins., watch all)
Optional Readings
- Chris Locke, Doc Searls & David Weinberger, Cluetrain Manifesto (just the manifesto)
Videos Watched in Class
Class Discussion
1. There has been several significant economic changes associated with internet and digital technologies which has created both new opportunities and new challenges.
Change: Access to information has impacted the way news is distributed, causing the world investment markets to move faster and become more volatile off of news.
New Opportunity: A greater understanding of how the internet works with distribution can allow for algorithms to be developed through digital technologies to counter act the news as its distributed.
New Challenge: With greater technology being created at the speed of light, it has become difficult to study trends for the investment markets, which are in some respects locked into a web based portal that can control the fate of public companies, instead of fundamentals.
2. There has been several significant political changes associated with internet and digital technologies which has created both new opportunities and new challenges.
Change: Access to information online about freedoms in the democracies around the world
New Opportunity: In the Middle East this was a major contributing factor in the Arab Spring, to bring and implement change.
New Challenge: With this new access to freedoms, the challenge of countries restricting information or access is now more than ever present. As in the article about Yahoo, France was able to restrict information making the access less free for the citizens in that country, compared to other parts of the world.
3. There has been several significant social changes associated with internet and digital technologies which has created both new opportunities and new challenges.
Change: Access to social media sites has fundamentally changed the way people interact with each other
New Opportunity: By establishing specific structures in place, access to a significant amount more potential people to do business with is available using these social media sites.
New Challenge: With greater access to more people, the amount of noise is constant. So standing out with your message is critical to stand out amongst the crowd.
4. There has been several significant cultural changes associated with internet and digital technologies which has created both new opportunities and new challenges.
Change: Access to education online or education in general for both genders
New Opportunity: More people are educated now than any part of the history of the world. In recent years with the Millenium Development Goals an emphasis of educating our youth and specifically woman as a priority has taken some real strives forward.
New Challenge: With this material change in focussing in educating women, groups like the Taliban has fired back with scare tactics to keep them out of schools. Interestingcomments 13:21, 28 January 2013 (EST)
One of the greatest economic changes to occur will be the ratification of the JOBS Act (Jumpstart Our Business Startups) which will allow private companies to solicit unaccredited investors to participate in their startups. Opportunities will be created for entrepreneurs and investors, but the innovation will also account for great investor losses due to the erosion of necessary barriers to fundraising. Additionally, it will create opportunities for fraud.
Another huge change brought about is the access to online education and training. At a time when unemployment is high, online education and training allows for additional specialization and creates opportunities for a large group of people who don't have the flexibility of schedule for traditional learning. A challenge is that quality has not kept up with the technology, so you are seeing a proliferation of sub-par learning experiences offering students degrees that leave them in massive amounts of debt, but don't necessarily make them more attractive of a candidate when it comes time to find a job. Phildade 15:21, 28 January 2013 (EST)
This whole section of Introduction I found very compelling. The language of the assignment was at first a bit unusual but now I am getting used to such communication. To duscuss the problems I have noticed with the internet, most noteably the discussion about Chinese, I found very compelling. Being different languages cave different means of speech production, the understanding that internet lauguage, like a fax machine, is actually the English I learned made me flip!Johnathan Merkwan 15:48, 28 January 2013 (EST)
A cultural change associated with digital technologies is how we share things that we create, whether it is music, photographs, videos/movies, etc and how the "ownership" of these items is decided. Between SOPA and PIPA and other copyright legislation, as well as the whole idea of open access, as much as we are able to share things with each other so much easier through technology, it opens a whole set of challenges as to how and if we monitor and control the sharing.
Another change is the reliance we have on search engines like Yahoo and Google in how we find information. While we use these gateways to comb the Internet for us and to make the process seemingly simpler, we also, at times, have a false sense of comfort that we are getting all of the information available through these search engines when that’s not always the case. As we have fewer and fewer search engines available, the monopoly that a search engine has on our ability to find information and relevant information online grows. And as this happens, we also tend to settle for the initial results rather than taking the time to dig deeper. We put a lot of faith in our search engines.
The Internet has given us numerous new ways to interact and communicate with each other. One way in particular that I think has really changed how we communicate is the anonymity that the Internet provides. There are challenges and opportunities that arise from this. While people often will say things online anonymously that they may not say to a person in real life there are often times where being able to be anonymous on the Internet, allows people a sense of comfort and place that may be lacking in their everyday life. Nfonsh 16:05, 28 January 2013 (EST)