The Death of Web 2.0

Ethics, Connectivity and Recognition in the Twenty-First Century

Greg Singh

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780429670770
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Digital Media
• Index: Computer Science

With all our contemporary connectivity, are we really connected? What does the nature of connectivity tell us about interpersonal and community relationships? What ethical concerns are raised through an always-on culture?

Communication in today's world is characterised by a condition of persistent, semi-permanent connectivity, which seems to bring us closer together, but which can also be profoundly alienating. The Death of Web 2.0 takes a retrospective look at a moment in recent media history that has had, and will continue to have, a lasting impact upon the predominant attitude towards cultures of connectivity. Greg Singh draws from a range of approaches, intellectual traditions and scholarly disciplines to engage key questions underpinning the contemporary communications media ecosystem.

Bringing together influences from communitarian ethics, recognition theory and relational and depth psychology, Singh synthesises key approaches to produce a critical inquiry that projects the tensions at the heart of connectivity as a principle of Web 2.0. He argues that Web 2.0 is a cultural moment that is truly over, and that what is popularly described as 'Web 2.0' is an altogether different set of principles and practices. The Death of Web 2.0 recognises the consequences of our 'always-on' culture, where judgments are made quickly and where impacts can be far-reaching, affecting our relationships, wellbeing, mental health and the health of our communities, and it concludes by asking what an ethics of connectivity would look like.

This unique interdisciplinary work will be essential reading for academics and students of Jungian and post-Jungian studies, media and cultural studies and psychosocial studies as well as anyone interested in the social implications of new media.

PART I

Connectivity and the spirit of conviviality

1

A COMMUNITARIAN DISQUISITION ON DIGITAL LITERACY

Geert Lovink (2011) usefully summarises early Web commentary as being comprised of four key themes or discourses. These discourses cover usability, access, privacy and copyright, discourses which underpinned some of the themes I addressed in the introductory chapter, and I continue that discussion here. Together, these ideas, and ways of communicating these ideas, constitute powerful freedoms of opinion, communication, expression, economy and creativity. These familiar freedoms are commonly thought of as key characteristics of modern democracies, as well as vehicles for the mobilisation of identities within such political frameworks. Indeed, in the popular sense, these ideas, communicating such freedoms, are key to understanding the principles driving the Web, particularly as kinds of promises made on the potential of the Web for democratic process. Of course, these promises for democracy were always far-fetched; and, indeed, as John Bellamy Foster and Robert McChesney state in an article for the Monthly Review, the far-reaching aspirations of the early commentators on Internet technology certainly had the highest hopes for its social and political impacts. They outline these hopes as ‘more competitive markets and accountable businesses, open government, an end to corruption, and decreasing inequality’, amounting to kinds of promises towards a better life (2011: para 5). Indeed, so stark and damning is their critique of Web discourse that it is worth repeating here at length.

The Internet, or more broadly, the digital revolution is truly changing the world at multiple levels. But it has also failed to deliver on much of the promise that was once seen as implicit in its technology. If the Internet was expected to provide more competitive markets and accountable businesses, open government, an end to corruption, and decreasing inequality—or, to put it baldly, increased human happiness—it has been a disappointment. To put it another way, if the Internet actually improved the world over the past twenty years as much as its champions once predicted, we dread to think where the world would be if it had never existed.

Of course, many people would claim that their lives have indeed changed for the better, particularly in the realm of participatory cultures where the technology itself seems to afford ever-greater access to the means of production, and a sense of connection with others who also participate. In sum, for Foster and McChesney, the early Internet, and subsequently the Web, promised so much and seemed to deliver; and yet in some ways, we live in a world strangely uniform in its inequalities, suffering and corruption.

As we shall see in Chapter 2, several well-known thinkers on these issues, such as David Gauntlett (2011) and Henry Jenkins (1992, 2006, and with Green and Ford, 2013, and with Ito and boyd, 2015), have suggested that, in various ways, the very act of participating in media connectivity and creativity creates the conditions for a more democratic culture. This is connected to an older argument involving the importance of a literate public for the dissemination of democratic ideas and literacy in general as a mechanism for increasing political awareness and participation. For Lovink, commentators more generally have often concentrated on the relative functionality or dysfunctionality of these connectivity elements as a key indicator of the health of democracy at the turn of the millennium, and, indeed, one might think of this approach as sitting in the tradition of debates on the state of the public sphere.

In my view, we need to think through these issues within the specific cultural and political frameworks of digital literacy, as this feeds off both the aspirations of all four Web discourses Lovink mentions, and also provides us with material outcomes of these discourses in the formation of policy and legislation in the area of digital literacy. This is even the case in relation to Lovink’s remarks in regarding Web 2.0 as having run its course, and therefore killed off the urgency of these questions in popular and academic criticism. As stated in the Introduction, for Lovink, Web 2.0 is ‘no longer sufficient to complain about network society’s dysfunctionalities in terms of usability, access, privacy or copyright infringements’ (2011: 3) because that moment is, for all intents and purposes, over. However, I want to argue that the disappearance of these discourses (or at the very least, their reduced urgency) is something of a signifier for the ways in which the ideological contestation for the status and definition of digital literacy has tended to decouple from the civic (and, therefore, ethical) values which underpin it as a public educational project.

In the course of Chapters 2 and 3, I intend to take the reader through some of the concerns in defining and refocusing what we might take digital literacy to mean, particularly in light of some of the myths surrounding notions of creativity and connectivity – and, therefore, how we might proceed with an ethically focused media education in response to currents in Web 2.0 discourse. Before this, however, it will be necessary and useful to take a step back, asking some key questions regarding Web 2.0 discourse. In what ways might one start thinking ethically about how the death of Web 2.0 came about in the first place? Where does the notion of its death come from, and what specific moral forms does it take? How might one reconcile this with the current focus on Web 2.0 and digital skills, social media strategies, policy-making in the UK and shifts in emphasis within media education?

Four Web discourses on promises made and broken: usability, access, privacy and copyright

I would like to start by drawing from the field of information ethics in order to tease out some of the salient concerns for Web and Web 2.0. Here, one may begin by thinking through Richard Mason’s (1986) seminal paper, ‘Four Ethical Issues of the Information Age’ in Management Information Systems Quarterly. In this paper, Mason outlines four main ethical issues for information thinking. These may be summarised (1986: 5) as follows.

• Privacy: ‘What information about one’s self or one’s associations must a person reveal to others, under what conditions and with what safeguards? What things can people keep to themselves and not be forced to reveal to others?’

• Accuracy: ‘Who is responsible for the authenticity, fidelity and accuracy of information? Similarly, who is to be held accountable for errors in information and how is the injured party to be made whole?’

• Property: ‘Who owns information? What are the just and fair prices for its exchange? Who owns the channels, especially the airways, through which information is transmitted? How should access to this scarce resource be allocated?’

• Accessibility: ‘What information does a person or an organization have a right or a privilege to obtain, under what conditions and with what safeguards?’

These ethical issues are useful to consider the more general ethical dilemmas with which we are confronted in the field of technology. They are also useful in thinking about how our digital lives overlap considerably with our political identities as individuals, as well as our social being, constituted as members of communities or as individual actors within institutional frameworks. In fact, these are issues to which I return, in various forms, within a variety of contexts throughout the remainder of this book.

Certainly, even the more practically oriented courses in the field of digital media studies have at their centres some sort of coverage of these themes or, at least, a combination of some of them. Indeed, those educators I have spoken to regarding the direction of digital content in media studies have managed to keep some of the more obvious principles intact. To my mind, especially when one takes into consideration the shifting definitions of such concepts, and the shifting emphasis in importance amongst these issues in the course of the last two or three decades in the field of information ethics, these issues remain remarkably salient. This salience has been tested out in the field.

For example, Freeman and Peace (2005) take the idea of ‘justified hacking’ as a test case, stating that the ‘ethical nature of the hack depends on the actions being protested, the violation of another organization’s property, and the resulting damage done’ (2005: 10). This can be thought through in relation to wider ethical challenges where illegal acts may in some cases be deemed ethical. The classic case usually cited in legal studies is that it was illegal to hide Jews in Germany and certain occupied territories during World War II. Clearly there seems to be a humanitarian aspect to such an action which would make this an ethical thing to do, but this activity historically took place as an illegal activity. In terms of justified hacking, therefore, Mason’s terms remain salient.

As an aspect of digital literacy and ethics which will be the focus of discussion later on, the notion of ‘accuracy’ is an interesting one here. Ordinarily, and certainly in the wider field of media studies, one might assume that accuracy of information is important in dealing with problems associated with anonymity, grooming, data protection and security, misrepresentation, input- or system-error – in fact, a whole host of familiar and newsworthy problems. Indeed, an empirical view might assume that, in order to pay for the services or applications of a company – services which, in the case of many popular social media applications on the market today are free to access – they would (and ought to) have the right to data on you, yielded from your use of the service or application. However, to take a properly ethical view, there may be reasonable exceptions to this. In falsifying data in a hack, one might be, say, the victim of domestic abuse and in hiding from an abuser. It is therefore entirely understandable that one might wish to protect or falsify data on location, shopping habits, visual information such as photographs, surreptitious webcam snapshots and so on to protect oneself. So many everyday technologies run background location-based data in popular applications. In this scenario, it is reasonably justifiable that the victim would seek to mitigate against location-based data being used to track them down by an abusive party through a malicious hack. This would particularly be the case where options to alter privacy settings or switch off location-based data within the parameters of the applications themselves have failed. The automation of such services, as well as the connectivity between programmes (e.g., Facebook Connect- and Slingshot-type processes; Instagram one-touch upload functionality; Google+, Instagram and YouTube interconnectivity etc.), and the default settings of many of these applications set to publicly viewable, means that although such openness of information is arguably unintentional, the outcomes often tell a different story. It is also worth noting that this kind of hack to protect oneself from harm might contravene the terms and conditions of the use of both the mobile hardware (and any associated contract) and the applications running on that hardware, but in this scenario such behaviour might be reasonably and ethically justified as steps toward protection from real harm.

This is also closely linked to the idea of privacy. In recent years, major news events covering cases such as the newspaper hacking scandal and the subsequent Leveson inquiry in the UK, the Wikileaks scandal and the Snowden/NSA case all fed off anxieties surrounding security and privacy. Certain questions have emerged: what is public knowledge, what ought to be kept as private matters or matters of national security and what is in the public interest to know? Indeed, in such extreme hypothetical cases similar to the one mentioned above concerning a victim of domestic abuse in hiding from their abuser, the notion of privacy extends to security (being fearful for one’s own life) and the very real harm that might ensue if one’s identity and location are exposed. However, these ethical considerations ought properly to also apply to less-extreme cases. Leveson was not only particularly instructive in opening up such questions, but also instrumental in exposing the limitations of relying on a public inquiry to mobilise policy at an administration level. Indeed, the UK’s historical digital literacy policy and e-security legacy in the light of recommendations as set out in the ‘Byron Report’ (2008), which examined aspects of children’s safety online, and offered some reasonable and realistic recommendations for policy (most of which were never enacted) seems to evidence this limitation.

In relation to accessibility, this issue is closely related to both property and accuracy issues – for example, how much access should an individual have to information stored about him or her in another entity’s system? Again, relating to data mining as a consensual practice in exchange for free-to-use and free-at-the-point-of-access applications and services, there are serious questions that perhaps ought to be raised with regards to exactly how much people understand concerning how information and data about them is used, stored, secured and sold on to third parties. The extent to which the importance of this comes to light revolves around a growing public awareness of the encroachment of such intrusive and open practices and how this has quietly eroded yet another facet of privacy in modern democracies. I discuss the implications of such erosion and encroachment in relation to the psychological dimensions of connectivity, identity and alienation throughout Part II of this book.

Once again there are intersections with other ethical issues and, in particular, with the notion of digital property – and, specifically for Freeman and Peace, intellectual property (2005: 14). They ask questions that address aspects of ownership of information, storage and security of data and if that data is representative of someone specifically. Current examples might include their consumption habits, their Snapchat stories, photo galleries on Facebook where they have been tagged and identified etc., and whether or not that person has the right to access and alter that data.

Of particular salience here is the usual prevalence of news stories to create moral panics around the uses of technology and the perceived safety (and indeed, wildness) of children and youths. The fact that location-based data is often embedded at a meta-level in photo and video galleries in many social media applications is a cause for anxiety, particularly in cases where parents may have, in an entirely innocuous everyday act, posted snaps or video clips of their children. The stories go something like this: what’s to stop a sexual predator from tracking these children down using the metadata found online, and the visual information represented by the photograph? The anxieties caused through such attention to these phenomena are real enough – and typical parents’ responses might include removing photos and content relating to their children and/or changing privacy settings retrospectively. My view, however, is that this is not the end of the story. Tagged photographs or video clips of this sort present us with a specific problem. Again, similar anxieties might be caused and similar questions raised concerning the online safety of children, and the subsequent potential abuse of information and data gleaned online (in this case, information-rich identity tags linking, potentially, to other social media profiles as well as providing real-world names and details). However, in addition to this dimension, a more general ethical question ought to be raised regarding the practice of tagging and how data might be generated about other users without their direct knowledge or consent. For minors (and especially children who do not meet the minimum age requirements to hold their own social media accounts) the question of consent seems to have been disavowed altogether, because they are not of majority age to provide any such consent. This practice of being tagged without consent (and, sometimes, without knowledge on the part of the ‘tagged’) can be examined, for example, in the following hypothetical scenario.

‘Jared’ is tagged by ‘Phil’ in a photograph (taken in 2012 and posted on Facebook in 2013) on a night out at his student union bar. At the time he was snapped, Jared was drinking alcoholic cocktails featuring a well-known energy drink during a drinks promotion-themed night, of the kind prevalent in student union bars throughout the UK, with the logo of the energy drink clearly made out in a canvas banner in the background of the photograph. Jared had been working at the local branch of a well-known electronics retailer during the day, and went straight to the union bar to join his friends, still wearing his branded staff uniform. He is unaware that he has been tagged because he hasn’t examined his timeline with close scrutiny and has not checked his privacy settings since an automated update happened the week previous to the night of the photograph. Besides this, he is unaware that Phil has the ability to tag him in photos. Jared graduates in 2013 and wishes to put his wild student days behind him, and so quits drinking and enjoys a healthy lifestyle. He is also not a particularly heavy user of Facebook, preferring outdoor activities, and after graduation leaves his account almost completely inactive. In 2015, Jared applies to work at an accountancy firm, but despite being the most capable applicant, fails to make the interview round thanks to the recruitment policies of the firm, who employ specific social media sweeps of applicants’ profiles. The photo Phil took of Jared incriminates him in dubious night-time behaviour of the sort that the firm would disapprove of in their employees. The firm have a policy of not providing feedback to candidates who do not make the final interview round for job applications. Jared therefore remains unaware of the incriminating photo. Forward to 2017, and Jared receives a written notice threatening legal action from the retailer he worked for as a student for contravening his employer’s social media policy. He tracks down the photograph in question, removes the tag and asks Phil to remove the picture. Phil complies. However, during 2019 Jared receives several marketing calls from an energy drinks company, several marketing emails from a dating site and from an electronics retailer and marketing texts from low-cost insurance companies. These companies all have data files on Jared’s consumer habits, which include, nominally, all of the practices which may be inferred from the data gleaned from his social media profiles.

These are, of course, over-simplified and fairly extreme hypothetical possibilities that recent ‘opt-out by default’ initiatives such as GDPR are set up to mitigate. However, it is perfectly within the realms of possibility that any of these eventualities might occur, purely beyond Jared’s control but within the bounds of legality. Ethically speaking, the question of agency is of particular importance. Jared appears to have little in his defence here, because this has all occurred within the legal bounds of the terms and conditions of Facebook use, to which he agreed, and within the rights of the institutions which have decided to take umbrage. The fact that he, along with millions of other users, hadn’t paid any attention to the terms and conditions policies of his social media accounts is of no concern in the legal sense. Neither is his ignorance of his former employer’s social media policies – nor, it would seem, is there a moral right to protection from marketing spam.

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Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Whatever Happened to Web 2.0?
• Part I Connectivity and the Spirit of Conviviality
• Part II Recognition, Self-Realisation and the Principle of Mutuality
• Conclusion: What Would An Ethics of Connectivity Look Like? Some Final Notes on the Death of Web 2.0
• Bibliography
• Index