- 15/01/2018
- Category: Commentaries
In 2017, the Internet has once again proven its immense power as a tool for freedom, building communities and raising awareness to social voids and turning ideas into massive activism and even social change. This fact is coherent with Manuel Castells’s prediction in the wake of early mainstream internet development who claimed that the Internet would be a platform of democracy against repression.[i] With the existence of the Internet and social media, people will no longer have the dependency towards the allegedly corrupt and fraudulent mainstream media makers because everyone can simply tweet, blog, or in the 2017 context, Instagram-story their activism. Despite the optimistic perception, 2017 also exposes instances of gloomier outlook on internet forthcoming, as shown by the net neutrality discourse recently. It is therefore interesting to observe deeper on the trends and discourses of digital lifestyle that have ensued in 2017, and finding its position in the bigger picture of the Internet as a whole.
Social media continued to be a platform of digital activism in 2017, as what has happened since the beginning of its expansion. The nature of social media enabled social causes to spread virally in a short time. The phenomenon of the #IceBucketChallenge back in 2014 was considered as one the most evident usage of social media platforms to raise awareness on a social issue, in which the hashtag raised over $115 million and helped discover a previously unknown ALS gene.[ii] In 2017, the trend endures as more people are connected online, echoing the underlying causes they put attention to. Hashtags continue to be a tool for implementing the public education tactic at an early stage of activism in social media. ‘The Silence Breakers’ movement, along with its #MeToo hashtag is a prime 2017 example. In this regard, hashtags support the role of social media in democratizing public education. With information flowing through networks of users connected by formal ties as well as informal hashtag networks, new possibilities for educating the public have emerged.[iii] The hashtag went viral in mid-October this year following the sexual harassment allegations against producer Harvey Weinstein, where Twitter reported that more than 1.7 million women and men had used the #MeToo hashtag in 85 countries.[iv]
Another issue at stake is regarding users’ privacy online. During the second-half of 2017, Facebook has encountered allegations that it is retrieving real-life conversations of its users. As terrifying as it sounds, this is not a new issue in the digital world as what has been exposed by Edward Snowden back in 2013 and the subsequent global surveillance episodes. Facebook has denied the allegation by stating that such inferences were acquired through algorithms that were collected from users data regarding their online visits and topic interests on the web.[v] Regardless of whether Facebook is listening to us or not, the fact that such theory emerges shows the materialization of user’s scepticism towards tech companies concerning privacy policies. Moreover, it also concludes the capacity of social media companies in perfecting the art of marketing strategy through algorithm technologies.
Privacy issues also attacked the development of the Internet of Things (IoT). In 2017, wide concerns about cyber-attacks, outages and privacy violations continue to unroll as the consequences of the constant progression of IoT development. As everyday objects have become more increasingly connected, they are carrying along data that boosts local, national and global systems as well as individuals’ day-to-day lives. Unfortunately, it does come with a cost, in which the growing integration poses exploitable vulnerabilities.[vi] The WannaCry ransomware attacks on May this year is perhaps the most prominent recent example that confirms such concerns. It is not impossible that attacks and ransomware concerns in years ahead will cause significant numbers of people to decide to disconnect. As expected, the recent trends have not yet gone to such extremes as consumers are showing an increasing tendency to demand better security and privacy that will protect them from unsolicited surveillance and possible data breaching.[vii]
Nonetheless, the most prominent issue to the Internet in 2017 is perhaps the discourse surrounding net neutrality. In brief, The US Federal Communication Commission (FCC) has recently voted to roll back the Obama-era Open Internet, threatening the equality of access of information in the cyberspace. Considering the novelty of the FCC ruling, it is too early to fathom how exactly the net-neutrality decision will affect users, from individual consumers to content creators and giant tech-developers. Regardless, internet experts predict the arrivals of widespread blocking and throttling, not to mention pay-for-play fast lanes that might benefit big companies like Netflix and Google, and prevent upstarts from enjoying innovation and growth.[viii] One thing for certain is that the decision depicts a gesture suggesting the increasingly dominant role of the government in the internet domain.
Amidst the booming conversations on the domain of digital lifestyle around the Internet, two inquiries can be inferred as takeaways. Primarily, the Internet and social media continue to prove itself to be an immensely powerful tool to raise awareness regarding the magnitude of underlying problems within the society. However, even though the awareness can spread around the web at such rapid speeds, it does not automatically translate into concrete solutions of the issue being addressed. Therefore, it is noteworthy to discuss that according to research, a tangible and real-life organizational infrastructure is indispensable for a digital moment to transform into real social change.[ix] This finding denotes the further progression of advocacy organizations to make the best out of social media to put their cause forward.
Secondly, and perhaps most crucially, 2017 reconfirms that internet progression is not a one-directional process. As the Internet continues to be utilized by many as a tool for freedom, it is also moving towards stricter regulations, and even has been used as an instrument towards subjugation. These issues restate that cybercitizens need to stop avoiding the discussion on the structural problems of the Internet. For so long, the discourse around such issues merely revolves around individual usage and less about what the system has contributed to the problem. Understanding this will provide another perspective that will reveal the massive corrupt system of the Internet. This is not at all a statement to call for pessimism towards technology since the challenge does not rest on the “technology” per se. Instead, it is the underlying system on how unequal power relations support the disruption of the democracy of the Internet.
What do these digital phenomena have in common? Observing on both the hopeful and the pessimistic events on digital lifestyle in 2017, it is clear that technology is becoming increasingly incorporated to our life, leaving little to no space between our physical life and digital life. The growing integration between human and technology is largely facilitated by the rapid proliferation of smartphones. In 2018, the gap between material and virtual life is expected to narrow even more as forecasted in a report by Deloitte. The prediction suggests that the role of the smartphone in society for all users including tech vendors, screen manufacturers, enterprises and government, is likely to grow increasingly central.[x] This is to say that multiple outcomes from smartphones’ development are possible to be utilized for a broader range of human activities. It is also predicted that members of the older generations are rapidly embracing smartphones and may start to depend on them for their activities, ranging from access to public transport to paying for parking, shift to smartphones.[xi] All of these confirm that the smartphone is an innovation whose full potential is far from accomplished.
Although useful, smartphones will be under heavy scrutiny as Deloitte Global also envisages that users will progressively to put concern on their smartphone behaviour. In 2018, it is expected that 45 percent of global adult smartphone users will consider their phone usage to be too excessive and that they will go to great lengths to limit their phone usage habits through various methods.[xii] Conclusively, the same report predicts that most adults are contented with their current smartphone habits. Instead, they are focusing on controlling usage when it is distracting them from activities they would prefer to concentrate on. To solve this, an interdisciplinary plan should be piloted by phone manufacturers, software and app developers, and network operators to help smartphone users enjoy less distracted sleeping, driving, walking, and time with family and friends.[xiii] This is to ensure that technology will truly improve one’s quality of life instead of diminishing it.
In a world where social activism and marketing strategy are closely interlaced with digital technology, it is only logical that users are starting to scrutinize their dependency to the internet. In 2018, one can expect that the high tide of technology integration to our day-to-day life will prompt more people to put their digital reliance into scrutiny. It is not impossible that 2018 would be the time when the progressively digitalized human lifestyle will reach its saturation point. This means that choices have to be made on which portion of our lifestyle will continue to be integrated into cyberspace, and to what extent. In a democratic society, the choices will eventually determine the forthcoming on how the Internet affects our lifestyle for years ahead.
References
[i] Castells, M. (2011). Comunicación, Poder y Democracia, Retrieved 15 November 2011.
[ii] Woolf, N. (2017). Remember the ice bucket challenge? It just funded an ALS breakthrough. [online] the Guardian. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/jul/26/ice-bucket-challenge-als-charity-gene-discovery [Accessed 15 Dec. 2017].
[iii] Guo, C. and Saxton, G. (2013). Tweeting Social Change. Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, 43(1), pp.57-79.
[iv] Sandee LaMotte, C. (2017). #MeToo: From social campaign to social change? [online] CNN. Available at: http://edition.cnn.com/2017/10/30/health/metoo-legacy/index.html [Accessed 18 Dec. 2017].
[v] Titcomb, J. (2017). ‘Facebook is listening to me’: Why this conspiracy theory refuses to die. [online] The Telegraph. Available at: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2017/10/30/facebook-listening-conspiracy-theory-refuses-die/ [Accessed 17 Dec. 2017].
[vi] Bannan, C. (2017). The IoT threat to privacy. [online] TechCrunch. Available at: https://techcrunch.com/2016/08/14/the-iot-threat-to-privacy/ [Accessed 18 Dec. 2017].
[vii] Ibid
[viii] Bogost, I. (2017). Net Neutrality Was Never Enough. [online] The Atlantic. Available at: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/12/net-neutrality-was-never-enough/548549/ [Accessed 17 Dec. 2017].
[ix] Ibid
[x] Deloitte (2017). Technology, Media and Telecommunications Predictions 2018. [online] London: Deloitte. Available at: https://www2.deloitte.com/global/en/pages/technology-media-and-telecommunications/articles/tmt-predictions.html [Accessed 24 Dec. 2017].
[xi] Ibid
[xii] Deloitte (2017). Deloitte’s Global Mobile Consumer Survey. [online] London: Deloitte.
[xiii] Ibid
