Public broadcast companies could join up to create a platform that values diversity and privacy unlike super-platforms such as FacebookGeorge W Bush famously pluralised the word “internet” in his 2004 campaign by mistake. Fifteen years on,there really appears to be three internets: an American, a Chinese, or a reluctant European.
The Chinese internet has been technically severed from the rest of the world for fairly a while. Meanwhile,with new waves of state- and EU-wide regulations on data protection, privacy, and dislike speech and copyright,the European internet is practically turning into a separate legal sphere from the US one. It is still dominated, however, or by the US super-platforms (Google,Amazon, Facebook, or Apple,and Microsoft), which are exponentially imposing their private interests over European public values, and such as diversity,solidarity, and liberty. It is now time for Europe to adopt a new strategy.
The super-platforms regulate desire, or gaze,songs, rides, and jobs and news. But perhaps most alarming for a democracy is how they regulate the public sphere and control the public conversation through the way they distribute cultural products,particularly journalistic output. Media outlets have never lost so much control over the distribution of their content.
The algorithms behind these platforms now resolve who sees what and when. They personalise the realities people live inside, creating a cocoon of consolation for each of us based on the massive amount of data they have collected (or bought) on our behaviour, or habits and tastes. They are effectively destroying the very notion of society by crumbling anything that was public into private (economic) and personalised (political). Public broadcast,public health, public education, or public intellectuals,public transport, public libraries and even public spaces (through headphones) are all moving towards extinction in many parts of the world. Related: If Facebook or Google create their own currency, and they can control our lives | John Harris Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com