Digital Society: Follow up to Session on “The Individual” (2016/7)

This is an archived version of a page from Digital Society 2016/7, to preserve content for past participants. See the main page for the latest materials.

Thanks for your contributions to the session on Monday (and for putting up with my not inconsiderable rantings!)

We covered quite a lot of material and hopefully you all got some ideas for themes to write about for you final assessment (digisoc3).

For those that missed it we covered the following stuff.

Generational differences:
Here we discussed some of the perceived differences between Digital Immigrants and Digital Natives. Personally I am not fond of these distinctions though there are plenty who would disagree with me! Marc Prensky is a good person to research if you want to find out more on this topic…

Ethics
We looked at a couple of high profile cases where technology and issues of ethics have overlapped (The Panama Papers and Ashley Madison). It seems that most of you felt the individual was at fault in the Ashley Madison case (your results below):

Voting results from class on 20/03/2017. Menti.com [image used for illustration purposes]

In retrospect I should have asked you a different question as I inadvertently got us focusing too much on the moral issues here. In both cases it’s important to note that the actions of the hackers led to fairly serious consequences for a number of individuals. It’s certainly a topic you could explore further…

Turning off the internet
We fairly quickly came to realise that turning off the internet would be a step too far. Despite being a relatively new phenomenon the internet has become so much a part of our daily lives that it is hard to imagine life without it. I do however feel that some of the problems I alluded to need solutions… Any ideas on this would be welcome (and would likely make a decent topic for your blog posts). For those that missed the session we talked about the following problems. The session Padlet contains some introductory readings that might help you to begin thinking of some solutions to these issues:

• Trolling & bullying
• Profiling / Spamming
• Terrorism / Dark Web
• Surveillance societies

Thanks again for taking part. A very good book to read about ways society can look to channel the true potential of the internet is Jonathan Zittrain’s “The Future of the Internet: and how to stop it”. It’s freely available and contains some very thought provoking arguments.