Digital Age Promises and Dangers | Tools and Weapons

Digital Age: Opportunities and Challenges, A Double-Edged Sword! The new technologies that the digital age incorporates into our lives every day also cause new experiences and habits. These experiences become so much a part of our lives that there are times when we don’t know how to live without them. It is obvious that we are in a process of digital transformation and that this process will evolve in different ways every day. But can human beings be the only winners in this process?

What do companies that offer this service have? How can we understand where the digital resources we use today are headed, what they promise us, but also what they take away from us? Tools and Weapons: The Promises and Dangers of the Digital Age, written by Microsoft President Brad Smith and Senior Communications and External Relations Manager Carol Ann Browne; By focusing on who is managing the digital age and on what level, they offer perspective on its impacts.

Digital Age: Trust Cloud Technology or Not!

When transferring from one device to a different device, we make use of cloud technology when finding a space to back them up while making space for our data. But in which cloud does our data really wait for us during this service? How can we identify and visualize the location where our data is backed up digitally? How many rooms can our data fit into, and how much weight can it fit in a cloud? Although some answers can be given to these questions from a technical point of view, it creates question marks where and who else is available to use this data in the main query. Technology companies sometimes use this data with our conscious upload, but sometimes they find it on a website we enter or in an application we download with all the cookies we print and accept as a “dodge”.

A lot of data that we hide and back up because it is very important; it becomes part of a cloud where we don’t know where it’s hidden, what it’s used for. Sometimes we think we’ve deleted some data from this cloud, but the cloud still knows that we’ve deleted it. So being a user in the digital world causes us to live in an atmosphere where it is never possible to leave a trace. Within this cloud, personalities about users are formed. While a person is one of these personas, he is actually one of millions of people and a unique person who encounters personalized content according to himself or herself. Perhaps the memory of the cloud is stronger than the memory of the only human being.

How Powerful Is the World of Data? Digital Age Promises and Dangers!

Think of the side-by-side buildings where the data is collected, a computer of your own within them. Who sits at the head of it, checks them all, and when you enter your full social media account, expertly selects the hotel recommendations of the resort you just mentioned and sends them in front of you?

Artificial intelligence is a force that controls the digital content that billions of people are exposed to in everyday life. But is artificial intelligence really to blame or the brain? The main intelligence that directs artificial intelligence, controls it and uses the relevant data; perhaps he is not subject to any permission from those whose data he collects, nor does he give an account. In other words, the moves of technology companies seem to be just simulations for people addicted to the Technology Products. There is an order in which they give their hands the things of their own lives and wait for what can be done with them.

So, in what ways do companies use these tools while presenting their tools to the society within this order? Could these tools become a weapon with which man shoots himself?

When one lives in one’s own bubble and sees the possibility of seeing others on a scale that technology companies find appropriate, one creates a huge dilemma of freedom in a digital age. Therefore, all the digital media in which one thinks that one exhibits one’s own will; it gives man the space to give him pleasure “as if he were free” within the limits he finds appropriate.

Who is the strong in this illusion?

Man builds a world within the short pleasures he receives in this field and within the small choices he thinks he has chosen, but which are already known. While one’s world is close to somebody, it always remains distant to others. Therefore, even digital tools that people think they can encounter everyone and every thought are nothing more than an illusion. Who is the strong in this illusion, who establishes and destroys this illusion or magic?

According to Smith and Browne; Leaving this ambiguous ground in the evaluation of data solely in the hands of technology companies is a big loss. Can holding tech companies to account be a solution to build a more responsible hi-tech industry?

Although there are all the negativities and insecurities, it is not possible for people to disconnect from the benefits of the digital age. But the prospect of developing solutions in itself is a conceivable act on behalf of their experience in digital.

Personal privacy in this new digital age?

Here, the fact that some of our information is also considered public makes it difficult to discover where it leads, but public knowledge during control of the use of this information can increase accountability. In the course of our individual inquiries, the book asks the following question for the possibility of finding balance: “How do we strike the right balance between public safety, individual convenience, and personal privacy in this new age?”

Although it is difficult to find the right balance, it is difficult to even try. This requires a digital literacy and competency development. However, since it is not possible to fully realize and detect this, according to the authors; we cannot leave what happens to us during the development of technology to the decision of technologists. Because this issue contains more vital threats than we can never forget.

Ignoring even Washington?

But not to leave it to the monopoly of technologists and corporations runs counter to the view repeated on the west coast of the United States of leaving the government out of business for innovation. Tech companies, on the other hand, have a tendency not to see the damage they’re doing and not take responsible action for it. For this reason, in this complex system; leaving everything to companies and experts with the idea that it cannot change anything really allows nothing to change, but the continuity of the whole system.

Microsoft Founder Bill Gates’ statement that Microsoft made a mistake in ignoring even Washington at the time; It plays an important role in drawing Microsoft’s strategy today. But this stance, which Gates describes as a “mistake,” is being repeated by all tech companies.

While we can’t hold tech companies accountable, the book “Tools and Weapons: The Promises and Dangers of the Digital Age” can be on your bookshelf, reminding us that we live in a digital paradox to understand how one of the biggest tech companies has admitted their own mistakes and how they see the entire ecosystem working.