Reviewer-Prelim-Social-Issues.docx

SOCIAL CONTEXT - The adoption of the Internet, and other ICTs, has not been uniform throughout the world. - This inequality is often referred to as the **digital divide.** - Global Internet penetration in 2008 was still at around one-fifth of the world's population and fewer than 10...

SOCIAL CONTEXT - The adoption of the Internet, and other ICTs, has not been uniform throughout the world. - This inequality is often referred to as the **digital divide.** - Global Internet penetration in 2008 was still at around one-fifth of the world's population and fewer than 10% of Internet users had access to broadband. - It is the gap between those who have access to the Information Society and those who are deprived of such access. **It mirrors and exacerbates existing disparities in society:** * gaps in education (for example, illiteracy)* * disability* * location (rural-urban)* * gender* * race* * income level* **For instance, consider the three individuals:** - University of Cape Town lecturer who has a personal computer and a reliable Internet connect. - A student from a township, like Khayelitsha, who has access to an Internet café. - And a student who lives in rural area such as Cofimvaba who depends on a parent to print information at work. ***These three individuals have access to ICT in varying degrees.*** **Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development** - is an international economic organization of 34 countries, founded in 1961 to stimulate economic progress and world trade. - It is a forum of countries describing themselves as committed to democracy and the market economy, providing a platform to compare policy experiences, seeking answers to common problems, identify good practices and coordinate domestic and international policies of its members. - There are times where people are not able to directly use ICTs. The barrier is not caused by only financial constraints but rather one's physical abilities. - This is the case for individuals who have physical disabilities. - **BRAILLE** is a writing system for blind and visually impaired people. - Unfortunately, the hardware for certain functions such as Braille interface can be expensive. - Companies may not consider such individuals as part of their 'intended' audience for their products. - The **Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990** can be used, in America, in forcing a company to offer an accessible website. **DEVELOPER BIASES, ASSUMPTIONS, AND VALUES** - The designers of software tend to have certain preconceptions about the users of their software. Likewise, developers tend to come with their own expectations about the audience for which they are building software. - Sometimes, the problems with our software are not a result of the biases held by the developers. At times, the computer may use biases and behaviors that are prevalent in society. This is especially important since machine learning is growing and is using real world data for training. - ***For instance, Microsoft's chatbot, They, learned to tweet racist and anti-Semitic remarks within hours of its deployment on Twitter, and Google's image tagging system once tagged images of black people as gorillas.*** - The Eastman Kodak Company, producer of photography products, used Shirley cards to balance skin- tone in still photograph for a long time. - The card is named after **Shirley**, a model who worked for Kodak, and was pictured on the cards. This meant that photos of people who did not have fair skin were not properly balanced. - For instance, there were reported incidents of the Nikon Coolpix S630 digital camera displaying "Did someone blink?" messages when individuals whose eyes have the epicanthic fold were being photographed. - This meant that the message was shown for mostly individuals of Asian heritage even though they were not blinking. **WORLD WIDE MOBILE REVOLUTION** - Since the 1990s there has been an explosion of increasing capacity of connectivity and bandwidth in successive generations of mobile phones. - In 1991 there were about 16 million wireless phone subscriptions in the world. - By July 2008, subscriptions had surpassed 3.4 billion, or about 52% of the world population. - In the 2000s we have witnessed increasing technological convergence between the Internet, wireless communication and multiple applications for communicating over wireless networks. - There has also been a price reduction in the production of certain electronics thus leading to the ubiquity of certain sensors. This has resulted in what is called the **Internet of things**. **INTERNET OF THINGS** - This the ability to have devices such fridges, stoves, etc. and traditional machines such as computer to be able to share data. - This means that individuals are able to have 'smart' houses where one can remotely turn their lights on and off, check whether they turned off the stove, etc. - The interconnection via the Internet of computing devices embedded in everyday objects, enabling them to send and receive data. **INTERACTIVE MEDIA** - **Internet or World Wide Web** are means of interactive communication: the boundaries between mass media communication and all other forms of communication are blurring. - Used to access mass media (television, radio, newspapers), and digitized culture or information: films, music, books, and journal articles. It has already transformed television as its reception be- comes individualized. - With its diverse range of applications, it is the communication fabric of our lives, for work, for personal connection, for information, for entertainment, for public services, for politics, and for religion. - Music listening has been transformed by streaming services (Spotify). - Computer delivered electronic system that allows the user to control, combine and manipulate different types of media such as text, sound, video, computer, graphics and animation. **MASS SELF -- COMMUNICATION** - The developments outlined above have now resulted in a different form of communication: **Mass Self-Communication (so-called Web 2.0).** - *For example, YouTube, is a video-sharing website where individual users, organizations, companies, and governments can upload their own video content.* - **Web 2.0** describes World Wide Web sites that emphasize user-generated content, usability, and interoperability. It is not a technical update but rather refers to an emerging way in which the web is used. - **Web 2.0** : is a dynamic website it provides ability to make changes to content. Allow the user to respond to website ***Example**: Entering of product reviews* - *Sharing of experiences* - *Uploading a video* - *Ability to send and receive information from other sources.* - *Accessible from various devices* - *Give information about what you want.* - **THE SEMANTIC WEB (WEB 3.0)** - is an extension of the web standards by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and refers to W3C's vision of the Web of linked data. Semantic Web technologies enable people to create data stores on the Web, build vocabularies, and write rules for handling data. - Is a semantic website which refers to the feature in web 2., computers can interpret information like too much intelligently generate and distribute useful content tailored to the user. - Will act as an assistant. - Is personalized because it analyzes you behavioral pattern online , it will try to understand your needs. - Mass communication study of how people exchange info through mass media through large segment of population. Example of mass communication are commercial advertisements, journalism, political campaign and etc. - This is mass communication but user-generated content is a very different means of mass communication to what was ever seen before. - Pressures are of course exercised on free expression on YouTube, particularly legal threats for copyright infringements. There can also be government censorship of content. China blocks access to many foreign websites (they are not "banned"), see Table 2.1. China has its own equivalents for many social sites but these are censored. - China's great firewall reflects the states paranoid fear of opposition to on party rule and prevents spread of important ideas. - China blocked thousands of websites using its notorious system" **The Great Firewall**" the reason for China's aggressive take on the Internet is to allegedly protects citizens from outside influence and harmful information. - China's internet is like intranet a private networked within an enterprise through VPN. - Peer to peer file sharing is the distribution and sharing of digital media using peer to peer network technology. - BitTorrent is one of the most common protocols for transferring large files such as digital video files containing Tv shows, video clips or digital audio file containing songs. INTERNET GOVERNANCE - The Internet is governed by a number of organizations to allow a 'decentralized network'. - The groups which are responsible for the protocols used in the Internet include the ICANN, Internet Engineering Task Force, Internet Society, etc. - There are number of telecoms companies which operate in South Africa, these are the mobile providers **Telkom Mobile/8ta, MTN, Vodacom, Cell C and Virgin Mobile**. - Telkom is the largest company (partially owned by the South African government) which provides infrastructure for the Internet. SOCIAL SPACES ON THE WEB - On-line communities have become a fundamental dimension of everyday life and they are growing everywhere, including China and developing countries. In countries with good broadband connections there has been an explosion of interactive computer and video games, today a multi-billion- dollar global industry. - The largest on-line game community, **World of Warcraft (WOW),** which accounts for just over half of the Massively Multiplayer Online Game (MMOG) industry, reached over 10 million active members (over half of which reside in the Asian continent) in 2008. - The organization "we are social" publishes world wide data on social media use. - Their latest report is dated January 2017. They report, for example, that of a total population of 1 231 million people there are 362 internet users (29%) and 170 million (14%) social media users. - The number of mobile subscriptions stand at 995 million (81%). - Privacy on the communication channels that we use is not guaranteed. - Most importantly, even when anonymity is guaranteed with respect to the content of our conversations, the meta-data of the communications could tell malicious actors significant information about us. - This is evidenced by the former national security agency (NSA) director's statement, **General Michael Hayden**, who once said **"We kill people based on metadata".** This is important because people tend to share sensitive information in online communications due to their assumption that their conversations are protected. LESSON 2 ( SOCIAL CONTEXT) - It was during the Second World War, and in its aftermath, that major technological breakthroughs in electronics took place: the first programmable computer and the transistor. - These occurred in several stages of innovation in the three main technological fields: **micro-electronics, computers, and telecommunications.** **THE TRANSISTOR** - Made the fast processing of electric impulses in a binary mode possible. - This enabled the coding of logic and communication between machines. - Semiconductor processing devices --- integrated circuits or 'chips' --- are now made of millions of transistors. **INTEL 4 BIT 4004 MICROPROCESSOR** - That is the computer on a chip, and information-processing power could thus be installed everywhere. - Intel 4004 4 bit microprocessor was developed as a central processing unit for a Japanese Calculator manufacturer name BUSICOM. **MOORE'S LAW** - The observation that the number of transistors in an integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years is referred to as Moore's law (**named after Gordon Moore**). - This led to a con- sequential doubling of computer processing power every 18--24 months. - In the last two decades of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first in- creasing chip power resulted in a dramatic enhancement of micro-computing power. ARPANET - The US DoD, through the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), created the first large computer network in 1969. - This resulted in ARPANET, which connected numerous US universities to each other, and which employed the internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) from 1983. In 1988 South Africa's pioneering email connection to the US (and later an internet node) was set up at Rhodes University. Tim-Berners Lee - The social power and expansion of the internet awaited the invention of the World Wide Web by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN in 1989. - He also decided that the technology should not be proprietary, and this was instrumental in its spread after its release in 1991. - From the late 1980s there was a growth of commercial providers of networks. - A new form of society has arisen through a number of major concurrent social, technological, economic, and cultural transformations. - A particular feature of the transformation has, lately, been the radical changes in the ways people communicate. - The new network society is not bound by national boundaries and has turned into a global system. **GLOBALIZATION** - Is a process of interaction and integration among the people, companies, and governments of different nations, a process driven by international trade and investment and aided by information technology. - Globalization is speed up of movements and changes. - In globalizing the process of production of goods and services, thousands of jobs, particularly in manufacturing, have been eliminated in advanced economies either by automation or by relocation to newly industrialized countries. - Job creation and the increased education of the labor force has not resulted in a sustained improvement of living standards in the industrialized world. This is because the level of compensation for the majority of workers has not followed the growth of productivity and profits. - **Immigration** plays a significant role in economies and societies around the world as labor tries to follow global job opportunities. - **ICT** are transforming the world of work, creating new job opportunities and making labor markets more innovative, inclusive and global. **XENOPHOBIA** - Xenophobia a strong feeling of dislike or fear of people from other countries. - Unreasonable fear and dislike of strange or foreign people, customs and etc. - On 12 May 2008 a series of riots started in the township of Alexandra (in the north-eastern part of Johannesburg) when locals attacked migrants from Mozambique, Malawi and Zimbabwe, killing two people and injuring 40 others. Foreigners are being targeted in south Africa. - The existence of online jobs may seem to give the individual more control over who to work for and when to work. - In the manufacturing sector, it is known that **proletarians**, especially in developing countries, are likely to work for low salaries in sweatshops producing material for large companies. - The Internet also opens gullible people to exploitation. The Finnish government closed down a service which charged people 1.20e to receive regular SMS texts which it claimed came from Jesus. **TRANSFORMATION OF COMMUNICATION** - The Internet is old (having started 1969) but only diffused on a large scale twenty years later, because of several factors: - regulatory changes & privatization in the 1990s; - open source software & open protocols; - greater bandwidth in telecommunications and switching capacity; - diffusion of personal computers and local networks; - user-friendly software programs that made it easy to upload, access, and communicate content: beginning with the World Wide Web server and browser designed by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN in 1990; - rapidly growing social demand for the networking of everything, arising from both the needs of the business world and the public's desire to build its own communication networks. The number of Internet users on the planet grew from under 40 million in 1995 to about 1.5 billion in 2009. **DEMOCRATIC COMMUNICATION** - Democratic governments throughout the world have been using ICTs for improving their services. - We all know that democratic countries function well when their government officials understand the needs of their constituents and are able to communicate with them easily. - Governments which make use of ICT are referred to as digital governments. There are three basic areas where ICT is used, and these are access to information, transaction services, and citizen participation. **For instance:** - Statistics South Africa (SSA) provides census data through their website, - The South African Revenue Services (SARS) allows the submission of tax returns (among other services) through their eFiling service, and - Johannesburg Road Agency (JRA) developed a mobile application that empowers citizens with the ability to be able to report potholes quickly. These three are examples of the 3 categories of benefits of a digital government. - The Cameroonian government, for instance, shut down the Internet after the English-speaking section of the population, which has long felt politically alienated, went on strike. - The government had previously tried to shut down a twitter service that was provided by MTN Cameroon after it was used by citizens to distribute text messages which opposed the president's leadership. - For instance, Yoweri Museveni (President of Uganda since 1986), blocked social media as a "security measure to avert lies intended to incite violence and illegal declaration of election results" during the country's last elections. - There are cases where people have successfully used social media and other Internet services in repressive regimes, as in the case of the Green Movement in Iran. - Unfortunately, these successes are also accompanied by the improvement of the government's ability to use the Internet against its' own citizens.