The Social, Cultural and Environmental Costs of Hyper-Connectivity

Sleeping Through the Revolution

Mike Hynes

• Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781839099786
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

The ebook edition of this title is Open Access, thanks to Knowledge Unlatched funding, and freely available to read online.

This book seeks broader critical engagement with the design, development and adoption processes of contemporary digital technologies. Such technology has been the catalyst for great improvements in the fields of medicine, employment, education and communications. Yet, a new digital age has also brought a unique set of societal, cultural and environmental challenges that have yet to be fully understood and, when needed, confronted. It could be argued that aspirations to develop an information super-highway that would be an instrument for human flourishing, has given way to vast stores of worthless trivia and is hijacking our attention at every opportunity.

In the absence of robust sociological input at the conceptual stages of digital communication technology development, the probability of these tools and instruments delivering change that is deeply personally, socially, culturally and environmentally damaging will continue to grow. Critical exploration of the organisational, social, political and environmental context of digital communications technology is necessary, without which technology will continue to be left 'to its own device' to determine the social and cultural values of societies, for better or worse.

The Social, Cultural and Environmental Costs of Hyper-Connectivity investigates the profound effects 21st century digital technology is having on our individual and collective lives and seeks to confront the realities of a new digital age. Changes brought about by digital technology are frequently disruptive and, thus, need to be designed to protect against harm on society.

Chapter 1

Introduction

One of the great liabilities of history is that all too many people fail to remain awake through great periods of social change. Every society has its protectors of status quo and its fraternities of the indifferent who are notorious for sleeping through revolutions. Today, our very survival depends on our ability to stay awake, to adjust to new ideas, to remain vigilant and to face the challenge of change.

Martin Luther King (1968)

Electrical information devices for universal, tyrannical womb-to-tomb surveillance are causing a very serious dilemma between our claim to privacy and the community’s need to know.

Marshall McLuhan (1967)

Our New Digital Age

In the twenty-first century, digital technologies have, and continue to have, profound effects on our individual and collective lives. They have been the catalyst for some incredible progress in the fields of medicine, work, education and communications broadly, and this has allowed us stay better connected to family and friends over distance than any time in human history. Cheap, lightweight, portable, mobile, digital information and communication devices are not only connecting the world, but they are providing individuals with extraordinary access to vast stores of news and information through always-on internet connectivity and allowing people to organise and manage their daily routines effortlessly. But our new digital age has also brought a unique set of societal, cultural, economic and environmental challenges that have yet to be fully appreciated and confronted. By and large, the internet is dominated and controlled by some of the largest and most influential corporations we have known since the beginning of the industrial age. Such megacorporations operate across international borders and are immune to the conventional regulation and controls considered necessary for such large organisations to operate in liberal democracy societies in an ethical and socially responsible manner. In the absence of effective oversight and control, harmful and sometimes sinister forces are organising with almost impunity: harvesting, monetarising and weaponising vast quantities of our personal data in the Wild West environment of this new digital age. The noble aspirations of Tim Berners-Lee, the often-cited creator of the internet, to develop an information superhighway that would empower the individual and be an instrument for human flourishing have largely given way to vast stores of worthless trivia and deceit that is hijacking our attention at every opportunity, a plethora of extremism and hateful speech, cyberbullying, trolling and a bountiful supply of dancing cats and skateboarders falling over.

This book aims to build upon a previous call for a stronger sociological engagement with the design, development and adoption processes of digital information and communication technology (ICT).¹ In the absence of robust sociological investigation and imagination at the conceptual stages of digital technology development, the probability of such technologies delivering changes that are deeply personally, socially, culturally and environmentally damaging will continue to grow apace. An enhanced and more critical exploration and understanding of the personal, organisational, social, political and environmental context of the emergence of digital ICT is, therefore, urgently required. Without such critical investigation and reflection, digital technologies will continue to be left to their own devices to determine and influence the social, economic and cultural values of our societies, for better or worse. But it’s not just features such as the internet and social media; there is a headlong rush towards digitalisation driven by an almost unstoppable technological determinism and utopianism that does not match the realities of what is now emerging from the first decades of this new digital age. Many individuals across society have now awoken to real and genuine concerns and fears about the influence and overreach of such digital technologies in the transformation and shaping of individual lives and community behaviours. Immense changes in how we coordinate our lives, in our homes, in the organisation of work and leisure, are all been driven at breakneck speed by technologies controlled by a handful of individuals and organisations, leaving many helpless as to their oversight, course and influence on our overall well-being. We thus begin this chapter with a brief exploration of the impacts and consequences of a digital-based surveillance technology that has emerged with little debate and almost undetected over the recent past: facial recognition.

Big Brother Knows Exactly Who You Are!

When you post a photo on a social networking website and the platform automatically tags an individual in the image, you might not give a second thought about the technology that underlies such a convenient and useful feature. In addition to this automated process, individuals themselves can tag photos and identify persons on social media or in cloud storage facilities on Microsoft, Apple or Google. We will soon be able to check out at supermarkets and department stores without having to pull out our money or credit cards; our faces simply scanned and matched to the store’s customer database and financial management systems. Retail outlets have already begun to use technology to generate vast detailed purchase data on their customers, tracking our every move and shopping habits and micro-targeting in-store marketing and advertising. At an artificial intelligence (AI) bar or restaurant, facial recognition technology will soon be used to identify customers who approach the counter to provide a speedy, more efficient and personalised service, matching your drink and food preferences to that previously stored on their point-of-sale systems. Churches are now beginning to use facial recognition technology to monitor attendance at religious services, and schools are seeking to use it to keep tabs on students who may be trying to skip class and teachers who take longer than normal coffee breaks. Biometric authentication is being used by Chinese authorities in Beijing now combating a toilet paper stealing epidemic by locking the supplies away behind a dispenser powered by such facial recognition software.²

As facial recognition becomes mainstream, your face will soon become your password, unlocking everything from your smartphone to your bank account. Phones like the iPhone X, Galaxy Note 9 and LG G7 all use biometric information which allow you unlock your device, and we can only expect other smartphone manufacturers to improve upon this facial unlocking feature into the future. Want to know who is at your door? A video doorbell with facial recognition software will not only let you know someone is there but who that someone is, regardless of whether you know the person or not. Marketing departments and advertisers are quickly getting in on the act, and thanks to such technology, billboards can now micro-target advertisements based on exactly who individuals are: their sex, age, how they are feeling at a given time of the day or evening and other personal information that can be gleamed from their social media profiles to create a holistic picture of who the person is and how they are feeling.

One of the key advantages of facial recognition technology may well be safety and the potential to enhance our overall security. Police forces are now using the technology to track down criminals, to find missing children, the elderly or other vulnerable people in the community. In cities and towns where police do not have adequate manpower to tackle petty crime, business owners are beginning to install facial recognition systems to watch people and identify individuals of interest when they enter their premises. Airports are increasingly turning to such technology to allow passengers pass through their facilities without the need to check their passports; the US Department of Homeland Security predicts that it will be used on about 97 per cent of travellers to America by 2023.³ Facial recognition is also being used at live music events. A system was in place during Taylor Swift’s Rose Bowl concert in May 2018, according to Rolling Stone, in which a kiosk set up to allow fans watch a recording of Swift’s rehearsal had a camera hidden inside.⁴ Each image of a face was sent to a command post in Nashville where a facial recognition search was conducted against a database of known Taylor Swift stalkers. Being upfront about this use of the technology may have decreased its usefulness, but it does call into question the ethics of doing so without informing most law-abiding music fans whose faces were scanned and image then analysed. And what subsequently happened to this store of collected personal data after the event?

Facial recognition is the process of recognising and verifying the identity of an individual using a captured image of the person’s face, and the technology has developed rapidly over the recent past as the tech industry continues to build upon progress made in the underlying technology known as machine learning. It captures, analyses and compares features and patterns based on the person’s facial details, information gleamed from our insatiable desire to continually share our images and personal information with friends and family online. Thanks to Flickr, Pinterest, Instagram, Facebook, Google and a host of other sharing platforms, the internet now stores billions of photos of people’s faces, which have been scraped from our social media profiles and gathered into massive image datasets. These are then used to train deep neural networks, a mainstay of modern AI, to detect and recognise facial features using powerful graphics processing units (GPUs). When an image is captured on a security camera trained on a crowd or in a shopping centre, a ‘faceprint’ of elements – such as a person’s eye colour, shape and size, eyebrow thickness and contours of their nose – will organise and classify these features together. And much like a fingerprint record, by distinguishing a unique set or pattern of characteristics taken together distinctively identifies a person. This faceprint is then compared with images of known individuals in an image database to confirm identification, or a faceprint can be compared to a large database of facial images in the hope of identifying an unknown person. But this ability to record, store, analyse and easily access enormous amounts of images of individual faces on such an enormous scale leads to some fundamental challenges to our notion of privacy, equality and trust.

China, for instance, has enthusiastically embraced biometric authentication and automated facial recognition on a vast scale. Cameras now screen hundreds of thousands of citizens on a daily basis and have been used effectively, for example, to identify and control the Uighur population, a largely Muslim minority in the Xinjiang autonomous region persecuted on religious grounds, many of whom are now held in vast detention centres that dot the north-west of China.⁵ Over the recent past, authorities have considerably ramped up their ability to spy on the country’s nearly 1.4 billion people to new and disturbing levels, giving the world a blueprint for how to build the basis of a digital totalitarian state.⁶ The Chinese state is hurriedly refining technologies like facial recognition and combining this with phone and other identifying data allowing matches to be made much easier. Authorities in Russia ordered 260 million roubles ($4 million) of facial recognition technology for surveillance cameras to monitor protests and other mass gatherings in cities right across the country.⁷ Moscow claims to have one of the world’s largest networks of some 160,000 surveillance cameras, some equipped with facial recognition technology, and had plans to boost the number to 200,000 by the end of 2019. Proponent...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Chapter 1. Introduction
• Chapter 2. The Digital Behemoths
• Chapter 3. Towards Cultural Homogenisation
• Chapter 4. The Challenges to Our Innate Cognitive Abilities and Mental Well-being
• Chapter 5. The Smartphone: A Weapon of Mass Distraction
• Chapter 6. Online Privacy and Surveillance
• Chapter 7. Digital Divides
• Chapter 8. An Increasing Ecological Threat
• Chapter 9. Digital Democracy: The Winners and Losers
• Chapter 10. Retaking the Reins
• Index