Since almost a year now, I have a subscription to an online version of the New York Times. While I have to admit that the crossword puzzle is the most visited ‘page’ in the app, it is very interesting to read the news from a different perspective. Last week I saw an article that caught my attention, mainly due to the picture placed with the article (see the picture below). I was an image that on the one hand looked very strange, but also very familiar. It is the way everyone walks around or stands wanting for public transportation. It is even the way, write now as I am writing this blog, is sitting at the table on Sunday evening. Clearly, our mobile phones and social media have taken over a large part of our lives, even more than I, or anyone, would like to admit.
It puts a large amount of power in the hands of the big tech companies. The first wave of social media and technology was supposed to bring more freedom and “a better future for all mankind” (NYT, 2017). While, of course, it brings an immense amount of possibilities and freedom, it also comes with a degree of control from the perspective of the big players in the tech industry. Amazon can determine how people shop and what they buy, Google influences how you acquire knowledge and then Facebook determines how you communicate this knowledge to your friends. Or the whole world for that matter.
With people using Facebook to communicate, while being communicated to as well through ads, anyone who wants to be heard can be very cheaply and instantly. Clifford Stoll already predicted this in 1995, providing a more critical view on the rise of the web: ‘when most everyone shouts, few listen’.
The article mentions both a former Facebook engineer and the co-founder of Asana, who have programmed their phones to not let them use the social networking platform, with the Asana founder also banning multiple other applications including internet browsers and Gmail. A choice that I find hard to imagine in my own life, but would be an interesting experiment.
Something else that caught my attention was a comment written under the article on the website, which I found very interesting, and a fair observation:
“Take monopolistic addictive platforms that gather, track, store, and analyse the personal details of everyone with zero oversight, add in ridiculous sums of money from marketers peddling consumer goods to foreign governments pushing conspiracy theories, and is it any wonder the tech giants have started looking less like our saviours and more like the masters of a dystopian future” (NYT, 2017)
In what capacity will the tech giants be able to control how people life their lives in the future. Will their control grow, until everyone is simply programmed to like and do what they’ve been told, or will their come a big revolution in which we will take back control and move away from big social media platforms? Move away from one-way, fast, quick information, back to a slower and less streamlined society in which your next purchase is not recommended to you by a search engine but by your former next door neighbours cousin.
