Are things truly “free” in the digital world?

The English language keeps getting more condensed and shortened as technology advances. On the other hand the terms and conditions as well as user agreements to “free” products or services grow more, and more dense. In this day and age when society is thought be reading less and have the shortest attention span ever, these lengthy user agreements seems like a rather ironic concept. Instagram, Facebook, Google and services such as Itune provide these gargantuan user agreements that are 100’s of pages long, as well as being updated or completely changed all the time. Hundreds of thousands, even millions of people download and use these services regularly, but very few have ever actually taken the time to read the entire user agreements.

I myself have downloaded most, if not all of these services and can only admit that I have skimmed through parts of the user agreement with Itunes the very first time I ever uploaded it to my computer. Ever since then I cannot recall the last time I took the time to read any parts of a user agreement. As a society we believe that if these services are free, and everyone uses them then they must be simply harmless. The benefit to using these services is offering us a sense of “community” in this digital realm that can be kind of intimidating at times.

Community in every sense of the word is truly hard to define. Vincent Miller says,

“It is therefore difficult to say exactly what constitutes a community. For some, the term applies to very specific forms of social groupings tied to a commonplace and mutual interdependence, while for others it can be applied to almost any form of social grouping” (184).

Many sociologist even argue that community in its entirety is something of the past that cannot exist today in the modern age. Although community isn’t really capable of being defined, it is still something that is crucial for society. Change in this community type society is due to the change in structure of economy responsible for changes in spatial order by eliminating the constrictions of place on flow of goods, information and people. As a result people are loosing their feelings of tight-knit communities as they move to cities and change their jobs.

In our digital world today as choice increases we are no longer a face-to-face interaction society based on communities. People have the choice to interact, or not interact with whomever they want, wherever they want. People have the choice to be part of whatever online “community” they want without ever having to meet any of the members face-to-face. Anyone is welcome to become a member of any community whenever they like, and they are also welcome to stop interacting with the group or leave the group whenever they like.

“By contrast, online communities are created and sought out specifically to provide people with something that they want or do not have” (192).

These types of communities are much different than real world communities where you would get shunned for just leaving the group or not showing up. These types of communities on Facebook or Twitter are full of “weak ties”. We feel obligated to maintain these “weak ties” because they reinforce a feeling of community as well as opportunities through means of the flexible economy and employment. The services we form these communities on however are problematic because if you read the fine print on their user agreements, you may actually come to realize they aren’t as “harmless” as they seem.

Companies such as Facebook are gaining access to ultimately all of your information that you thought was “private” through your very own user accounts with them. These companies are capable of accessing your pictures, what your recent searches were online, your contacts and even your location. Agreeing to something like this almost seems insane, however we are all guilty of it when we sign up for these services and it’s right there, in the ever-growing user agreement. We agree to these user agreements because we want to maintain our “weak ties” as well as a feeling of community. Our privacy is being sacrificed simply because we want to feel the sense of community that once existed in a past life.

“at no point in the past have government agencies, private companies, or even lone individuals been able to collect so much information about others, in terms of their (virtual and physical) movements, their interactions and communications, or their interest and tastes” (120).

Miller argues that the overall nature of privacy is changing in society all due to technology. Government and corporations are taking advantage of the information that is available and accessible over the Internet. For example the most popular search engine, Google stores users information up to thirteen whole moths after it is accessed simply to help their marketing efforts. Thirteen months is an extensive amount of time and seems extremely irrelevant and ineffective.

“The point of creating databases and constructing profiles is to get closer to the individual: to make them measurable and thus ultimately predictable” (127).

The government argues that they should be allowed to save every email, phone, and text conversation you’ve had to be able to determine if you are a threat to the country or not. Not only the government, but potential employers as well feel the need to closely monitor employees or applicants over the Internet by use of Facebook, Instagram or Linkedin.

No matter what the reasoning is all of these are intruding on our privacy, and personal lives. This is problematic for society at large because people feel like they are not trustworthy and their employers, or the government automatically assume the worst about them. This creates a feeling of pressure and uneasiness that is problematic for everyone. Is it truly beneficial for a company to hire someone that is “perfect”? This perfect person being someone that has more credentials than possible, someone that does not have one single traffic violation, someone that has never posted a picture where they were intoxicated with their friends on their Facebook . Perfection is nearly impossible; people are in fact flawed, so where does the line get drawn?