If you haven't yet read this by Zeynep Tufecki, do so now. That is an order.
I remember all too well the early days of the Internet, followed by its wholesale migration to the World Wide Web. There was an intoxicating culture of revolution. The Internet was going to make information -- assumed to be a synonym for truth -- free for all. It would bring down tyrants, and liberate everyone from the soft tyranny of ideology and politicians' seductive promises and lies. Of course, all of these visionaries couldn't perceive their own ideology -- this was all closely bound up with a glib libertarianism and faith in a coming meritocracy in which they presumed they would rise to the top.
Well, that didn't happen. Before the WWW became largely synonymous with the Internet, the precursor of social media as we know it today was the on-line forum. Of course these still exist, with more sophisticated features, but the early experience should have served as a warning. The most popular subject for these fora was pornography, while accurate information and enlightening discourse were in short supply. With the development of contemporary forms of social media, the same excitement about a coming liberatory era re-appeared. Instead we got a catastrophe. As Tufecki writes:
Power always learns, and powerful tools always fall into its hands. This is a hard lesson of history but a solid one. It is key to understanding how, in seven years, digital technologies have gone from being hailed as tools of freedom and change to being blamed for upheavals in Western democracies—for enabling increased polarization, rising authoritarianism, and meddling in national elections by Russia and others.
But to fully understand what has happened, we also need to examine how human social dynamics, ubiquitous digital connectivity, and the business models of tech giants combine to create an environment where misinformation thrives and even true information can confuse and paralyze rather than informing and illuminating.
But Tufecki is wise enough to understand that the blame does not rest foundationally on the technology. She observes that "The Russian government may have used online platforms to remotely meddle in US elections, but Russia did not create the conditions of social distrust, weak institutions, and detached elites that made the US vulnerable to that kind of meddling." She goes on to check the campaign of lies that led to the Iraq war; the 2008 financial collapse that enriched some billionaires while costing millions of ordinary people their homes and jobs; the growing inaccessibility of higher education; tax evasion by multinational corporations and their billionaire executives; and all of the conditions which have left so many people vulnerable to misinformation and demagoguery. We need a kind of revolution, but the digital one won't make it happen.
2 comments:
Yes, I remember the usenet forums. And I was a sysop of a successful social bulletin board.
In every technological revolution, there are the few that ride the crest and do very, very well and then there's those who get caught up in the changes and don't do so well. Similar things happened during the industrial revolution with the rise of powerful men that controlled the railroads, steel production and energy production.
New laws were enacted to combat unfair practices for the new way of life. That is what will happen now. In the age of information, a handful of powerful companies and those who run them, unfairly control the flow of that information.
*NOW*, Hillary wants to do something about these big companies because she perceives they played a part in her defeat at the hands of Donald Trump. Totally uninterested when she thought they might be of help to her.
Better late than never.
Well maybe. I don't think Hillary or very many other people really thought about it one way of the other until quite recently, actually.
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