I wake this weekend to a barrage of articles warning me of the change that’s happened to my life.
You may just mis-advise yourself
Big Tech is fundamentally immoral
Give us our lives back
Is this a statement of helplessness or of the outsourcing of paranoia-gesting to AI?
This is the feeding from Bracken House in the City of London, the home of the FT.
I walk past its doors each day of the week, I associate it with people who come into work because they need to meet the people they’re reporting with on. When we read an article , we ask ourselves “why did she/he say that?”. We ask “why did they use those words?” We ask ourselves about the tone. In short I engage with what I am reading because I believe it is written by someone to me. There is one more headline in the FT this morning which goes against the grain of my experience.
UK ministers plan to force social media and video platforms such as YouTube and Meta to make public service news content more prominent, setting the stage for a fresh battle with Big Tech over online misinformation and illegal content.
At the same time , the Government has plans to move terrestrial programs off our TV screens and onto digital delivery brought to us by the interweb (as my Dad called it). Without “prominence” all information is equally relevant – we know where that takes us.
The switchover date is currently touted as 2034 by which time my mother will be (God willing) 102, I will be in my seventies. To suppose we have any right to control the delivery of our news may seem heartless, but teaching my Mum how to use WhatsApp has been edifying. The one issue is that fingers find it hard to scroll when you reach your later life.
Which brings me back to where this article started. The TV does at least bring us together, we know when the news is, when Morse is being repeated and follow the reorganisation of the program menu to cope with the World Cup using our program menus.
We have as yet not mastered bringing our families or households together as we used to “around the box”. We haven’t found a way of talking to each other of our reactions to what we’re watching. The best we can do is “share” a digitally accessed article (which is not spontaneous).
And this of course is to ignore the hegemony of messaging, which has taken over from email which in turn turned over the delivered letter. This is a revolution that has happened without most of us having any say.
We don’t mind unless we are old enough to mourn the loss of handwriting or of tippexed typed letters. I still get them from time to time from the people who look after my boat , they still have an electronic typewriter. The letters have typewritten addresses on the envelopes and have signatures which were once “wet”.
All of this has been lost to me (except from Freebody Boatbulders and in my mother’s letterbox). Engaging communication is being replaced by a myriad of sources , most of which are generated by the algorithms deep in the function of data centres. This dehumanisation of communication leaves no one to argue with, no one to agree with , no one to give a hug to when we next see them.
Here is the worry we have for those under 16 who may spend up to “9 hours a day on social media or stare at the wall if apps are taken off their phones”. “Phones” – they are hardly that if no one picks up calls and what calls you reach are from ever less human sources!
What we are really worried about is dehumanisation of a basic element of lives – communication. We need to be as worried as the FT.
Here is what’s left of the old world! Thanks Moonpig!
