When I switched on
the Internet at the School of Journalism at the end of the eighties
of the past century. I was impressed by the idea of electronic
communication: ranging from e-mail to IRC chat.
This would enhance
communication and understanding, and contribute to democracy. Now
the opposite is the case.
“At
the heart of their disenchantment, is that the internet has become
much more “centralised” (in the tech crowd’s terminology) than
it was even ten years ago”….”the system was “biased in favour
of decentralisation of power and freedom to act”,
writes
the Economist
.
From
de-centralized to centralized
Instead of have
direct one-on-one communication, decentralized and uncontrolled, we
are working on controlled centralized systems. “These
days the main way of getting online is via smartphones and tablets
that confine users to carefully circumscribed spaces, or “walled
gardens”, which are hardly more exciting than television channels
“.
It
almost looks like that the times before the Internet have returned.
Is Facebook so different from what was once Compuserve?
The decentralized infrastructure of the Internet is still there. On the
basic level the net still runs on TCP/IP . “The connections to
transfer information still exist, as do the protocols, but the
extensions the internet has spawned now greatly outweigh the original
network”. Not the basic level but the levels higher up are
centralized and controlled. Consumer websites and all these apps.
Take the social networks for example, we work on the machines of
Facebook (comparable with Compuserve mainframe). “The best way to
picture all this is as a vast collection of data silos with big pipes
between them, connected to all kinds of devices which both deliver
services and collect more data”.
Data
business
How
could that happen? Answer: data! “The Google search engine attracts
users, which attracts suppliers of content (in Google’s case,
websites that want to be listed in its index), which in turn improves
the user experience, and so on. Similarly, the more people use
Google’s search service, the more data it will collect, which helps
to make the results more relevant. “ And the same counts for
Facebook or Instagram. Data and targeted advertising are the basis of
the business model which turned the Internet in a totally different
beast. “Having tried to sell its technology to companies, it went
for advertising, later followed by Facebook and other big internet
firms. That choice meant they had to collect ever more data about
their users. The more information they have, the better they can
target their ads and the more they can charge for them.”
Take
back control
What
can we do to take back our original control over our communication on
the internet? Below give a summary of 4 possible solutions based on
the literature referred in the links.
