“A Citizen’s Gadget”

With regards to technology, some might consider the Internet to be a helpful medium for creating new job opportunities for people. According to The Technology Review, Microsoft currently employs about 135,000 employees worldwide; Google operates its business with more than 20,000 staff members internationally. Do these job opportunities necessarily help the economy’s growth? In my opinion, the new culture of technology already is and will become more destructive, rather than being beneficial to individuals. It has already harmed print and music industries and will soon damage businesses like cinemas and gaming companies.


As Lanier suggests in his book You are not a Gadget, the rapid influx of free music and video downloads has a negative influence upon the sphere of economics. Moreover, the culture of free “downloading,” regardless of the type of file, harms the value of the efforts that have been made toward their production. Therefore, the new culture not only damages certain industries, but it also discourages professionals from producing quality creations.

For instance, if a credential director cannot receive earnings equal to what he spends during the production of his movie (due to free downloads of his movie from the Internet), he would be unable to continue producing his next movie without detracting from its quality. As a result of this phenomenon, many professions are fading, and thus causing the replacement of quality creations with those that are done by ordinary people. A good example of this problem is exemplified by the battle between professional journalism and citizen journalism. As the Internet offers a multimedia environment, the phenomena of citizen journalism and blogging are growing rapidly. Nonetheless, citizen journalism is not an expert method of news reporting: the legitimacy of sources and style of news writing are very weak in citizen journalism. In other words, those who can write are not necessarily “writers.” Nonetheless, all the blogs and news articles on the Internet are damaging the value of true journalism and economically breaking the industry.

Indeed, the new culture of technology will not only have a more negative impact on economy, but it will also further influence the criteria of professional careers and businesses. Imagine living in a society that revolves around citizen journalists, citizen photographers, citizen movie makers, citizen engineers and nurses who utilize computer programming solely in their work. That day may not be too far ahead.

http://www.technologyreview.com/

http://www.purelogic.info/anti-technology.html