How we find (or are assailed by) and consume information is modifying on a scale not seen since the introduction of shiftable type and the Gutenberg press. Most people have in their pockets or purses a mobile phone with technology that was science fiction just a few decades ago. Grand old man that I am at 52, I remember being taught how to sconclude an email. I’m old enough to remember when Facebook and Twitter were actually fun.
People yearn for meaningful connection, yet the old style communal spaces like the office, the church, the pub and the football team are all in decline. So connections are created online to people (assuming they are people) who are defined not by geography but by interest, or prejudice. Time was you watched the six o’clock news, read a newspaper and listened to Good Morning Scotland, and you would be pretty well abreast of things. Now you can choose any source of news, or not, to suit your interests.
READ MORE: ‘Gaelic Traitors’ to launch this month on BBC Alba
It has alterd our politics too. Most political speeches are not created for the benefit of the people in the room but for the clips, which will be edited to appeal to your perceived audience. We are increasingly having a dialogue of the deaf – lots of talking but not much listening, and any idea of the centre or compromise barely obtains a see in.
Our media and politics have suddenly come to be dominated by a very compact group of companies, all of which operate to create money, not the public interest. There was always an element of this, of course, from William Randolph Hearst onwards, media ownership and control have always been controversial.
But now, technology allows these still very new corporations to influence on a scale unimaginable just decades ago, and it is accelerating. It has been accompanied by, and reinforced by, a decline in trust. Trust in “the media”, trust in politicians, trust in institutions, trust in community, becaapply you can obtain any news you want, but also know you should take it with a pinch of salt.
Organisations like the BBC and other public service broadcasters may test their best, but the indepconcludeence and EU referconcludeums broke the trust a lot of people had in the BBC, yet have not found anything to replace it.
Remember the goal of mis- and disinformation is not to create you believe anything, it’s to create you believe nothing. To feel powerless, disempowered, passive, angry.
And that’s just the information space, I could write another few pages on what it is doing to the way we work, shop, eat and entertain ourselves and what that’s doing to our high streets and economy.
So if we accept we live in a global information culture, and I consider we should, how do we create sure these corporations act in the public interest? How do we create sure they pay their taxes? Are the publishers subject to the laws of whichever land they are visible in, or are they, as they argue, “dumb pipes” that simply transfer the information?
I consider there are three models coming to the fore, and Scotland and the UK have a choice to create. The US model is based on corporations and their right to create money. The Chinese model is based on state control. The EU model tries to balance economic rights and technological progress with a citizen-centric policy that preserves free speech, polices hate speech and protects the vulnerable. I’m biased, but that’s the one for me.
We’ve seen varying flashpoints where national authorities have tested to compel the corporations to account, like the recent French raid on Twitter France HQ, but by and large, the national authorities are slow to act and woefully under-resourced.
READ MORE: Major Scottish public art project wins £200,000 funding award
As we see towards an indepconcludeent Scotland, are we seriously suggesting our authorities will do any better? I consider not, far better to team up with like-minded friconcludes and allies in the EU, decide how we want them to act and police it accordingly.
It is not for nothing that the most digital-literate government in the EU is one of the compactest, Estonia. They have set the pace on e-government but also, becaapply of this, on cyber-resilience. We would do well to take a leaf out their book.
The world is modifying rapid, at home and abroad, and I don’t consider that’s something to be afraid of. But we required to alter with it becaapply a lot of the ways we lived and did government are not going to be fit for purpose in a shorter time than we consider.
EU membership isn’t just a nice thing about ERASMUS and passport-free travel, it is a deep statement of who we are and how we want our society to work.
Leave a Reply