People are drawn to the web because it's a public square where they can share opinions and ideas. They can meet and organize with people they would never have encountered living in their pre-internet bubble. It has changed our civic life, revolutionized our media, and revived what's left of our democracy in all sorts of ways we take for granted.
The tech giants, telecoms, entertainment companies and speculative investors who run the internet infrastructure, though, have very different priorities. Such entities want it to work as a data collection tool where they absorb information about people and control the #content they see based on what will be most likely to help them know what they should buy. The consumer content bubbles they are building for us now will isolate us from each other in ways we are only beginning to understand.
No comments:
Post a Comment