It feels, at some level, that it lets the people in charge off the hook. Thoughts?
Having shared Euan Semple’s thought-provoking post, Adam got a fairly quick reply from Pete Brown which only further provoked me to once again consider a general viewpoint I have been wrestling with for the past few years.
An important point of context within these issues that is often neglected: these companies, this version of the web, a lot of it is US-centric. They are literally constructs made from the culture of the US, and whilst of course they are also built with a diversity of viewpoints I think it is vital to remember that there is a difference in how these things are built even compared to that which is most similar, for example Canada.
I don’t know, maybe I live in too much of a bubble of my circumstances in life but the fact remains that I have yet to meet people who are so desparately in need of the connected web on our own little island, as compared to seemingly large numbers of Americans for whom the internet has been something of a lifeboat. Not to say it isn’t significant here, of course it is, but rather that there is difference in the difference even between our two relatively similar nations… that the environment is different, there are different motivations for the various part of our societies, and that’s before we even get to Europe and further afield.
I’ve just never quite felt that if I were to sacrifice the internet my life would be inescapably ruined; at least with regard to the social, overly worked part of the internet where the silos and the like exist. As such I have never quite felt that this is necessarily a socio-economic aspect of our lives that requires constant and immediate care. In many ways, it truly is what it is and little else.
