Follow up to Session E (The individual) 2017–18

Notes for Digital Society participants

These are archived versions of the pages from Digital Society 2017/8, to preserve content for past participants. See the main page for the latest materials.

“A white neon on a wall reads “world”” by 2Photo Pots on Unsplash

Thanks for all your contributions to the session on Monday (and for listening to me have an internet related existential crisis).We covered 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 the session we covered the following:

Generational differences:
Here we discussed some of the perceived differences between generations and looked at the concept of 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 mostly at fault in the Ashley Madison case (your results below):

Voting results from Menti.com for face-to-face session: 19/03/2018

These cases are really interesting to follow up on. Technology played a key role in each case, blurring the lines of responsibility and these are things that could be explored further.

The issue of individual privacy also received a lively discussion, and it appears from your voting results below, that we had a wide range of opinions on this topic. Issues of government surveillance and security of our data have received loads of coverage in the media and would definitely make for an interesting research project:

Voting results from Menti.com for face-to-face session: 19/03/2018

Turning off the internet?
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 in the session 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.

Padlet

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

USA election and Brexit

We also briefly discussed the breaking news story relating to Cambridge Analytica’s use of Facebook data to influence democratic elections. This is likely to be a fast moving story and one it is worth keeping your eyes on as the course progresses. Check out these articles for the latest news !

Update — 20th March 2018

Since the session yesterday the Cambridge Analytica story has gone global, Facebook tried to physically access the service at Cambridge Analytica only to be told by the UK police that they had no legal right.

Facebook had no controls over our harvested data and didn’t know where it was going or how it was being used…..

'Utterly horrifying': ex-Facebook insider says covert data harvesting was routine

No 10 'very concerned' over Facebook data breach by Cambridge Analytica

Warrant sought for Cambridge Analytica

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.

Course materials

Dig soc session individual 3.pptx