Standing at the site of the Heidelberg printing press, mixed emotions sweep over, and I wonder if twenty years down the line this factory will still remain. I mentally make a list of which other businesses or profession suffered this technology called the Internet. On a lighter note, one should really rethink if they plan a career as a dictator. The Internet and its social networking sites will eventually pull you down.
Arthur C Clarke said in his third law that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” And magic it seems to be that tens of hundreds of engineers on the payroll of Google and Facebook and YouTube are employed to do. Syntax magic and algorithm magic. All of us, now products of this technology called Internet.
So, what does Google sell? It sells us. Our likes, interests, affiliations, choices, temperaments. Our demographics (registration data), our behavioural data (clickstream). Our personal preferences (like activity), attitudes and interests (survey data), locations (check-ins), opinions (content created), influences (content sharing), search interests (keywords), shopping preferences (transaction data), intentions (email scans). Some of this data is freely offered by us, some inferred by Google.
Global surveillance, infrastructural imperialism, yet we believe we are freer, we believe we have more rights, we believe in more democracy.” ‘You’ have freedom of choice, ‘You’ can let yourself be profiled so that ‘You’ receive solicitations from companies that interest ‘You’. ‘You’ could customise your cellphone with a ringtone. The emphasis on ‘You’ however is only a smokescreen. In this process of aggregation, who are you? Who are you to Google, to Amazon? Are you the sum of your consumer preferences and My Space personas? What is your contribution every month?”-Siva Vaidyanathan (The Googlization of everything).
This is not to discount the tremendous potential of the Internet in our everyday lives. The Internet at its best is the most effective dis-intermediary. Take media for example. The gatekeepers of information were the people who could afford to set up a press or a channel and have the resources to run it. Interpretation of information was at their discretion. And the consumers of news had a choice of these limited newspapers or magazines or channels from which to build their opinions upon. With the advent of the Internet, everyone became a reporter. Citizens took to writing their own news, their own stories, not being represented by owners of media – YouTube, Twitter, blogs became their platforms.
But as the scope of www expanded, unfortunately as in most markets the hegemony of few players prevailed. As Professor Robert McChesney, Professor of Communication at the University of Illinois, media reform advocate and the author of the book Digital Disconnect, says in his very long interview with Kindle Magazine this month, that the Internet is the greatest creator of economic monopolies in history. So while we make use of the Internet as an integral part of our lives now, it is most important that we be aware. The concern is that a few companies on the Internet will become the sourcing point for all our information. Any technology which has the power to frame our questions as also to answer them could have an altering effect to the way we view the world. How this is a double edged sword, is what we discuss in depth this month in the magazine.
