There were several points where I ‘loudly’ nodded while watching the recording of Dr. Hodgon’s presentation: “Mindful” social media engagement in an age of Cambridge Analytica.
- Communication for social good. Using Social Media Mindfully = SM/indfulness
- If you are not paying for the product, you are the product…
- As educators, we have to be responsible. We need to be the expert. We cannot dictate the platform, we have to provide options… There need to be options for the students…
- We rush to use the latest and greatest technology things… but they may have consequences in human rights, environment…
This last point truly resonated with me:
The tech community needs to start putting “OUGHT” before “CAN”. The tech industry spent the last decades moving fast and breaking things, and now those things are starting to break us. The web development industry, where I have been working for few years lacks, what most other industries whose work directly impacts people and the society we live in mostly has, is a practice built on a solid foundation of ethics.
If there is no ethical framework established for our industry, governments can and will impose restrictions on our work as is the case with the upcoming GDPR in Europe. Every single countries government have good reasons to follow Europe’s example: the situation with Facebook and Cambridge Analytica is not unique. It is another story of technology used where the creators did not consider the outcomes.
All illustrations are created by the author.
References
European Union General Data Protection Regulation. (2016, April 14). General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Retrieved from https://www.eugdpr.org/
Dr. Hodgon, J. (2018, April). “Mindful” social media engagement in an age of Cambridge. Presented in the Virtual Symposium of the 2018 MALAT Program at Royal Roads University, Victoria, BC, Canada.
Meredith, S. (2018, April 10). Facebook-Cambridge Analytica: A timeline of the data hijacking scandal. Retrieved from https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/10/facebook-cambridge-analytica-a-timeline-of-the-data-hijacking-scandal.html