The Making of The Impact of The Internet on Politics
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I am interested in cybersecurity & data privacy and the lack thereof which has led to data mining and its effect on democracy. As the world embraces digitalization, our daily lives become filled with all forms of digital media containing our data; therefore, I find data privacy to be one of the biggest topics of discussion in our society and politics. We have laws regarding privacy and the extent to which the government or anyone else can gather and share our information; however, with the internet, these laws have become quite unclear.
The EU introduced new laws regarding cookies and many social media tech giants have been faced with serious repercussions to their usage of user data. To gain deeper insights into our digitalized future I combed through old interviews of some of the pioneers of the internet to see if and how these influential tech people addressed these concerns when they were creating our digital future.
After going through several interviews I decided to focus on net neutrality, data privacy, and fake news/disinformation as topics that impact politics. I personally love connecting media and politics so I wanted to feature the events that went through my mind as I watched these interviews. I decided to include a wide range of sources from MSNBC to Fox News as it shows how polarizing the media is and how it only adds to the echo chambers we find ourselves in online.
Reflection
The biggest takeaway from watching the interviews was that even the experts did not expect this level of misuse of the Internet. Many of the interviews seemed very optimistic about transparency issues. Looking back it is funny how they were talking of Facebook only in its social media platform and now we have apps such as Instagram, Tik Tok, and Snapchat that may be even more alarming for data privacy. This goes to show that we truly cannot predict what technology will bring us in the next decade and beyond and as it is a brand new frontier with more facets being added to it (AI, machine learning, deep fakes, facial recognition, etc.). Although technology may at times seem intimidating or scary as it rapidly changes our status quo we must remember that it is inevitable part of our society and our goal should not be to fear it but embrace it with a critical lens. There is truly no proper way for us to prepare for technological evolution legally except to be over-prepared.
