Commercialism Prohibiting The Tracking Of Global Digital Cultures

The ability to track, visualise and even police global digital cultures is a task that seems relatively impossible due to its intangible and ever-expanding nature. Over 40% of the world’s population in 2014 is connected to the Internet compared to a stark 1% in 1995. These statistics translates to around 2.9 billion people being connected to the internet and of those people who are online, 70% of them use it daily. The figures are staggering especially when improved accessibility to the online world in developing countries will mean these figures will grow exponentially. To put this into perspective, there are billions of people online in the world at any given moment, most of which are actively scouring the internet and contributing by browsing, posting, producing and sharing digital content like a rapidly replicating bad cancer cell.

The task of staying on top of the global digital cultures may seem daunting and next to impossible at first, but it can certainly be fulfilled to some form of limited success. However, the idea of cyber tracking in itself opens up a can of worms in regards to one’s right to privacy, a right that has always been held high in the Human Rights Charter of Australia and most foreign countries.

Such forms of tracking have already been implemented by companies such as Google and Facebook to much public criticism. Facebook, for example, revealed not too long ago that they insert ‘cookies’ into users’ browsers when they log in to Facebook. These cookies operate to track the browser’s activity and records what the user searches, posts, likes, etc. This data is then collated about a person’s browsing habits and used to figure out political viewpoints, religious beliefs, hobbies or health issues about the consumers. Of course they would then commodify the information to tailor specific advertisements for the user on their Facebook page in order to generate advertising income.

On the surface it seems entirely possible to track digital cultures using the above method through certain portals. However, the reason that digital cultures can be tracked with ‘limited success’ is because the gatekeepers to the online portal are large corporate companies such as Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Yahoo who control the online presence and what can and can not be seen. These companies fundamentally exist to help people go about their day to day activities all online – whether they are helping them find information, organise it or share it, in many ways these Internet corporations have become the gatekeepers of information working on the World Wide Web on a global scale. Naturally as businesses, these corporations are there to make money and they utilise the collated information in their share of the Internet so that they can gain an advantage over their competitors and hopefully take a larger share of the international market.

Therefore the commercialism aspect of the Internet is primarily why it would be difficult as such to track the global digital cultures.