ALABATA, JOHANNA MARIE U.
REFLECTION ON THE INFORMATION AGE
Social media sites like Facebook and MySpace would allow users to interact with
people from all over the world. Facebook grew from about 400 million monthly active
users in 2010 to 2.45 billion at the end of 2019. Together with the UN's recent estimates
of the world's population at 7.7 billion people, this puts nearly a third of Earth's population
on Facebook.These technologies promised to usher in the "information age" in which
people would be better informed about the world around them and better connected to
each other by being able to communicate on a global scale using a handheld computer.
Social media sites would provide a way to stay up to date with your social circle, staying
in touch with what was going on in the lives of the people around you without even
needing to call or message them. The stage was set for a dramatic improvement in the
daily life of the average person: everyone could know what was going on with anything
or anyone at any time. While this technology actually allows instant communication with
anyone and access to billions of pages of information, there are many ways in which the
promised revolution has not only failed to deliver what was predicted at the beginning of
the "information age," but has also created problems that were previously non-existent.
Access to information is easier than ever, but it is completely decentralized. With
an estimate of the total number of websites that have grown exponentially over the past
decade and approach 2 billion in total, online information sources are highly
decentralized. Decentralization can lead to the proliferation of "fake news" and
disinformation through the Internet's secondary channels. A recent study in Science
magazine found that "fake news" spreads faster and to more people than real news, and
with so many different sources of information available, determining which sources are
reliable is a messy and time-consuming process that many people avoid spending time
on.
On the other hand, the centralization of the Internet in the form of ultra-popular
websites such as Google and Facebook leads to an intimidating level of power and control
of information by a few omnipotent companies. The information stored by "Big Data"
consists of individual facts about your career, friendships, family, interests, spending
habits, etc., which combine to form a general profile of who you are, whether your
relationship will last, how fast you drive, where you are or will travel in the future, and
more. The dramatic increase in the number of users on social media sites has sparked
heightened concern about users' privacy and a debate about the extent to which social
media companies should filter information to prevent the spread of fake news, issues that
were both raised during the 2018 Facebook Senate hearing. Beyond these challenges,
social media use has been shown to lead to various negative effects on mental health,
such as decreased sleep quality, hyperactivity, depression, anxiety, and loneliness.
Another study found higher rates of depressive symptoms and suicide among teens who
used smartphones and social media more frequently than in a separate group that used
them less often. Despite the inherent dangers of placing massive amounts of our personal
data in the hands of large companies, there are ways to use technology more deliberately.
Websites such as DuckDuckGo offer a search alternative to Google that doesn't collect
research data, Harvard has published one of many online guides to spot "fake news"
online, and taking a break from social media could lead to a reduction in anxiety and
depression. The problems that arise from the blind belief that better technology
automatically leads to a better life are becoming increasingly clear. I believe that the
answer to these problems is not an outright rejection of the new technologies themselves,
but rather a responsible reassessment of how we use them. I hope that the next decade
will see more and more people doing this assessment.