I keep coming back to the issue of ‘filtering’ the internet that is most concerning to me. I don’t care so much about morals – everyone has a different set; and I’m not that convinced of the technology – it will improve or not as it always does. What concerns me most is the effect that a filtered feed from all sources will have on us as a society and as individuals within that society.
It’s not so much that Big Brother is watching us 1984-style, it’s that we won’t be able to think our way clear on any issue. It’s not that we will have ‘thoughtcrimes’, it’s that we won’t have thoughts. Our perceptions, our knowledge, our reality will be reduced to whatever it is that we can access. Mindless facebooking, linking stuff, grabbing stuff, accumulating links[1]. It’s like the EPIC thing, the Evolving Personalised Information Construct.
But, where EPIC2014 hints at the commercialisation of the process, the current filtering proposals don’t even give us the option of anything evolving. Anything not appropriate will be filtered, we won’t have any choice.
We’re already seeing people mindlessly buying stuff on the internet, witness the Beijing Ticketing scam[2]. It’s that idea of ‘functional literacy’ in a hyperconnected world. People believe what they want to believe, they read what they want to read. But sometimes there is no thought behind the reading. There is no way for them to fully participate in the business of living. Hence we have people losing thousands of dollars to scammers, and not just any people, but even the tech savvy[3].
The idea that anything bad for us should be filtered, that children should be protected from accidentally realising that maybe, just maybe, their parents have sex, is quite disconcerting. Or is that the point of the filters – children shouldn’t even think that sex is normal[4].
I wonder at what will become of our ability to think when we have a clean feed. Here is your box, think inside it. Outside is bad, very bad.
Perhaps there is a better way.
