Technology: A New Epidemic?

Internet Addiction(Hinton)

The internet plays a gigantic role in day to day life. Without the internet, many of us may not even know what to do with our time. Recently, I watched a Ted Talk about how the internet has made history, and how it has created a new revolution in the field of technology. The speaker, Clay Shirky a journalist, speaks about the changes that the internet has brought. His opening point goes over how in elections, target audiences can now be targeted more easily with voter suppression through ads. He continues to say how they filmed the vote to show that it was fair and individuals would share their documentation online.

Voter suppression may not be affecting high schoolers now, but other forms of internet targeting is occuring. Have you ever noticed that one ad following you around from site to site? Well that ad is being placed there by an algorithm that collects your data to find your interests and past searches, to place an ad that will fit you. Zeynep Tufekci, a techno-sociologist, talks about these ads in her Ted Talk, saying,

“In the digital world, though, persuasion architecture can be built at the scale of billions and they can target, infer, understand and be deployed at individuals one by one by figuring out your weaknesses, and they can be sent to everyone's phone privacy screen, so it's not visible to us.”

Meaning that by just using the internet, our information is being collected and distributed to these “learning programs” which create matrices of our data and compare it to the general populous to find who we match with, what we like, and what we want to buy.

But not everything on the internet is a bad or dangerous thing. On this global platform we can work with and interact with different people about an endless possibility of things. In 2007, 16 years after the public release of the internet, the amount of time on social networking sites surpassed that of time spent on email sites (Castells). Two years later, and the number of social network users passed that of email users (Castells).

Media Logos (Solomon7's)

This means that more people and more time was spent on applications such as Facebook, was greater than that of people on yahoo mail or gmail. Showing that there is a shift in how the internet has been used how quickly it became addictive. It suggests a future internet central around social networks and addictive features. Meant to capture a user inside an interface of sensory bombardment, to absorb their time and create a distorted reality where algorithms are used to pull the user down a rabbit hole based on history of use. 

This shift caused a change in day to day life. Most people log in to social networking sites daily, if not multiple times a day. They want to stay up to date with the news and their friends. This causes a shift in behavior as each time the phone is viewed, dopamine is released creating a positive feeling. Not to mention that the aspects of most technology is to addict the user to the said program or site, making you spend vast amounts of time on that application. Our lifestyles have shifted and it's affecting us all. We need to limit ourselves and control what we can about the internet.

The only person that we can control is ourselves. We must limit ourselves to prevent an addiction that we can’t take back.

Works Cited

Castells, Manuel. "The Impact of the Internet on Society: A Global Perspective." MIT Technology Review , MIT, 8 Sept. 2014, www.technologyreview.com/s/530566/the-impact-of-the-internet-on-society-a-global-perspective/. Accessed 25 Nov. 2019.

Hinton, Bill. Internet Addiction. The New Yorker, 26 Nov. 2014, www.newyorker.com/science/maria-konnikova/internet-addiction-real-thing. Accessed 25 Nov. 2019.

Shirky, Clay. "How social media can make history." Ted Conference , June 2009. Speech.

Solomon7's. Social Media Logos . 8 Mar. 2017. Shutterstock, www.shutterstock.com/search/facebook+logo. Accessed 25 Nov. 2019.

Tufekci, Zeynep. "We're building a dystopia just to make people click on ads." Ted Conference , Sept. 2017. Speech.