Week 5 Assignment
Reading Response:
Shoshana Zuboff, 2019, Introduction, Surveillance Capitalism.
This reading by Zuboff brought up a lot of interesting points that are very relevant to our time and probably even moreso to our future. Something I felt as a relative newcomer to the tech field is that the author does seem to have an extremist point of view on the issue of surveillance, surveillance capitalism, and large corporations in general- I completely understood why she holds such a stance on these issues but at a certain point I wondered, to which end can we question the actions of institutions before we have to completely reject technology as a whole? I think that in some ways the author themself is somewhat contradicting herself in certain ways because she strongly states that in order to combat and actively resist falling into the convention of large corporations invading our privacy as a normal practice, we must be educated and cognizant of the situation in order to be fully aware of what are information is being used for. But, in order to be fully educated and hold an unbiased observer’s point of view, you must be able to understand arguments from both sides- I thought that while many of her points were valid, her style of writing and strong statements were somehow too biased towards one side of the argument and I could honestly see how her stances could be misleading for some audiences. One of the points I strongly agree with her on is about the term ‘technology’- at this point this term has become too large of an umbrella term to even remotely convey everything it represents yet somehow the word is imbued with a feeling a progress and positivity. I do think that for everyday consumers, hiding sly tactics like surveillance capitalism in unseen pockets can be very easy to dismiss and not recognizable for many consumers. Ultimately, I do understand that surveilllance is imminently threatening our rights as human beings, but contrary to the authors strong opposition on the matter, I believe that we must figure out ways to live with it and combat it in our own ways to the best of our own individual abilites going forward as it seems that surveillance as a capitalism will only grow in power as time progresses.
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