Do We Really have Autonomy Over our Information in This Digital Age ?

Media and technology have transformed our culture and society immensely over the past couple decades. This paper will explore the relationship between media and Internet, particularly if the affordances it creates for users outweigh the information and control that large-scale corporations gain from this.

The invention of the Internet and Web 2.0 opened up new types of opportunities for users to do just about anything online. Consumerism in particular was one of the things that increased with the agency to shop online. Web 2.0 and Capitalistic corporations make the increase in online shopping possible, enabling users to increase their productivity by using their cellphones to continue the production and consumption cycle any time of the day. By doing this they are using their phone as an extension of themselves. Although the public views this as a way the companies are making their lives easier, it allows those corporations to have more access and control over them. The fact that we give out so much of our information online like banking, taxes, address, Resumes and work history etc, gives not only the government access to our lives but also often takes away our rights without us even knowing. This is because the media and the Internet at large is all owned by the corporations and used as a tool to increase the amount of advertising and media we consume. Society views media and the Internet as a mode to express opinions and interact with peers and create a participatory democracy, but we must consider that us having access to these tools of communication is only in our control to a certain extent. The public only consumes and creates culture by what the media owned by corporations allow.

Corporations like Apple dominate the technology market and consumers agree to essentially give Apple full rights and access to their files and information stored on an Apple device. Applications like ICloud and Apple music are designed to basically sell you your own files and media. If you store your files on ICloud which is essentially storage space that lives on the internet than you have agreed to share those files, enabling Apple to view them and remove whatever they wish. The capacity for sharing and communicating allows people to share and interact in a public sphere online, many of those opinions and information can be coded with bias or simply not be pure but rather put forth by businesses. Some of the most popular and successful blogs and social media personalities are in fact controlled by business interest, in order to stay highly competitive they need to be constantly uploading and have those types of support. Something to consider is if the interests of capitalists indeed pollute our agency and autonomy while using devices like the Internet and our phones? Furthermore if the culture we create online is always clouded by those factors, can it be authentic and truly “user created”.