Originally Posted: March 4, 2020
Ken Daley, Senior Lecturer in the Department of Philosophy writes on the ethics of emerging technology in his blog Good Tech, Bad Tech.
The task of keeping up with tech news has become rather harrowing as of late. The avalanche of information keeps the constant replacement of stories flowing and our attention overloaded. This has become so clearly the case that it’s easy to forget what happened just a few weeks ago. Facebook’s weak stance on political ads quickly became Google’s acquisition of our medical records before both companies then announced they would narrowly expand the minimum number of profiles required for targeted ads. In fact, I expect companies like Facebook bake our forgetting into their internal, day-to-day practices.
This hurtling forward coupled with our inability to keep up with the resulting scandals has allowed for the actualizing of the oft-derided ‘move fast and break things’ motto. While one takeaway might be that our attention spans have contracted due to informational overload, it’s certainly not the only possibility. One might suspect that we are incapable of focusing on any particular tech scandal, not because of the shrinking of our attention spans but because of the ever-evolving techno-scandal culture we now inhabit. To recognize the ease with which we forget, one need only revisit one particularly troubling example of ‘breaking things’ from just a handful of years ago. READ MORE