Jaron Lanier on Digital Passivity {a cautionary tale on tablets, privacy, agency}


cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by Alan Cleaver

Jaron Lanier writes (and I’ve bolded my favorite phrases):

I fear that 2013 will be remembered as a tragic  and dark year in the digital universe … It was the year in which tablets became ubiquitous and advanced gadgets like 3-D printers and wearable interfaces emerged as pop phenomena; all great fun …

But 2013 was also the year in which we became aware of the corner we’ve backed ourselves into. We learned … how much our gadgets and our digital networks are being used to spy on us by ultra-powerful, remote organizations. We are being dissected more than we dissect…

Back at the dawn of personal computing, the idealistic notion that drove most of us was that computers were tools for leveraging human intelligence to ever-greater achievement and fulfillment…

But tablets do something unforeseen: They enforce a new power structure. Unlike a personal computer, a tablet runs only programs and applications approved by a central commercial authority. You control the data you enter into a PC, while data entered into a tablet is often managed by someone else…

I am not sure who is to blame for our digital passivity. Did we give up on ourselves too easily? …

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One can argue that network technology enhances democracy because it makes it possible, for example, to tweet your protests. But complaining is not yet success.Social media didn’t create jobs for young people in Cairo during the Arab Spring

When you carry around a smartphone with a GPS and camera and constantly pipe data to a computer owned by a corporation paid by advertisers to manipulate you, you are less free…

The rise of this consumer-surveillance economy is the uncomfortable and ironic backdrop to the outrage about the N.S.A. snooping. We feel violated. We don’t know who has been reading our most tender emails. But why then were we pouring all our personal information into remote corporations to begin with? …

Citizens in the information age have to learn to be more than just consumers; they have to learn to be a match for their own inventions.

Read the complete essay here and ponder what the implications are for schools betting big money on tablet-based computing. What are we training students to do when it comes to privacy and agency? What are our plans for avoiding the commoditization of students?

 

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