Final Presentation

 LINK

Final Post: Society and Technology

Technology is our salvation, if we can make it a more perfect union with society, rather than force ourselves to change to technology. The United States has made that mistake. We operate massive metal boxes daily at high speeds, while giving little to no thought about the person on the overgrown sidewalk who is trying to walk across 8 lanes. We have created a society through our development patterns which promotes isolation and unhealthy use of technology.

A suburban home is an island in a sea of islands, connected between each other through vast seas of asphalt. I use the word sea because that's the closest approximation to what it is, inhospitable to any organism besides those suited for it. We wrap ourselves in steel because it is the only protection available. We stay inside our air conditioned homes, and relegate ourselves to technology to fill the void in which social gathering once did.

You can see this shift in society through the attendance numbers of social groups and events like churches or town hall meetings. We have solved this problem of immobility by using technology to fill the gap. Why go over to a friend's house to watch a show when you could share your screen through FaceTime, or sit in a virtual-reality lounge to pass the time, especially when going to that friend means driving? When people used to go to churches, they'd stick around after the fact and enjoy some food and time with community, unknowingly forming deeper ties to their local community and building strong social bonds which fulfilled us. Now it's the Indy 500 as to who can screech out of the church parking lot the quickest so they can get back home to where the technology is.

We have, as a society, chosen to form ourselves to be with a closer union with technology, rather than allowing technology to form to us. We have changed our traditions, our environments, and our habits to better facilitate technology usage, and we are worse off for it. That is not to say technology is evil, rather our usage of it. Technology has facilitated instant global communication, scientific breakthroughs, and the elimination of many diseases. But as we have formed new technologies, those technologies formed us.

I woke up today to a weekly notification on my phone: My average daily screen time was down by 17%! I was pleased at this fact until I realized that it was reduced from 7 hours daily to 6. Without realizing it, I spent a 1/4 of my day, each day, the whole week, looking at my phone. Horrified, I went and asked my roommates, and they all had similar figures. I asked my parents, and they did too. I figured I was in some statistical bubble, so I looked up the averages for my age group. 7 hours, 22 minutes is the given figure by the American Psychological Association for the average daily screen time of a 14-18 year old.

I doubt better evidence exists of how much people have changed in response to technology than that figure. When my mom was a kid, the average daily screen time was however long your parents let you watch tv for after dinner. Now, looking at my younger cousin, who is 7, I see a child who is entirely dependent on the internet for entertainment. I shudder to think what her screen time figures look like. What effects does this have on society in the longer term? What does a society look like that has had a global communication device in their hands for as long as they were capable of holding it?

We are starting to see the effects in the United States. The most major symptom I see is a complete disregard for quality public spaces. My grandmother once said, "For a price of a cup of coffee in Paris you get a seat to the whole world for the day." She is referring to the attitude in European countries wherein public spaces are for the public - as in everyone is taken into consideration. For the price of a cup of coffee in America, you get a seat with a view of a massive parking lot, or if you're lucky, a 12 lane interstate.

These intentionally hostile spaces reflect the changing of culture in America as a result of technology. Why sit outside a coffee shop facing a parking lot when you could spill it on yourself while you're cruising down the interstate and cause a 42 car pile-up? These are the only choices given to us, so we choose the option which allows us to avoid the uncomfortable reality we now live in, so we solemnly pick up our Dunkin from the drive-thru and merge back on the highway.

War in the Age of Information (EC Blog)

For my second EOTO, I decided to delve into Citizen Journalism, or more specifically, Open Source Intelligence. Open Source intelligence is the novel practice of understanding and analyzing conflicts between nations through the social media they produce. The first example of this was the Arab Spring, where rebel movements oftentimes were broadcasted by the rebels themselves, using the medium as a platform to spread their ideas, first in Tunisia, then to numerous other Arabian countries. For the first time, a conflict was readily and immediately visible to those far flung from it.

More recently, in the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, starting in 2014 social media had been weaponized by Russia, who spent the equivalent of 19 million dollars funding a staff of 600 writers to pour pro-Russian propaganda on the open forum. This continued right up until the recent restrictions and sanctions on Russian social media by Western companies and the Russian government. But prior to that restriction, Russians were free to post whatever they wanted to a global audience.

The propaganda machine the Russians created worked well to stifle dissent in its own numerous regions, but only energized those outside of it. In the lead up to the invasion of Ukraine in February of 2022, I myself began to notice this propaganda, on Twitter, TikTok, and elsewhere. Videos showing the lumbering Russian war machine beginning to mobilize towards Ukraine began to appear in earnest in January 2022, and by February it was hard to miss the videos of tanks on trains, or soldiers drudging through the wilderness, among the cat pictures and memes. 

The videos, despite their prevalence, did not energize those in the West as much as one may have imagined. Western media that sought to energize their people against Russian aggression were often the places that were targeted by the propagandists the most. Twitter posts of news articles condemning the actions of Russia were flooded with comments by Russian bots and propagandists, attempting to defend the state's actions.

I, being completely immersed and intrigued by the implications and effects of technology on modern conflicts, chose to present on Citizen Journalism to my classmates to hopefully allow them to gain greater insight into the world we are in today. After seeing the propaganda penetrate into my own social media, I wanted to turn the presentation into an opportunity to show hard evidence that Russia was going to attack Ukraine, using the subject of my presentation to do so. In doing so I did not intend to provide an in depth analysis of the topic, but rather a practical example of the capabilities of Citizen Journalism. 

Since the invasion and subsequent restriction of social media, pro-Russian sentiment online has for the most part quieted. The videos of Ukrainians being killed do not. As I sit here writing this, my phone notified me that Kiev is currently being bombed. Yesterday I read Ukrainian government officials use facial scanning technology to identify dead Russians and notify their parents. The future will be weird, but whenever history is made, the world will now be there to see it.