There are strange days on the internet. It was dangerous days as well. There are Facebook groups with people drinking horse dewormer in anticipation of JFK Jr's resurrection, and there are also groups with kids filling up with eating disorders and suicidal thoughts. Push notifications, suggestions, tips and tricks from the hottest thinkfluencers of the minute, pop, pop, popping up unbidden and inescapable, demands the fealty of our screens as counted by our click throughs.
The internet was not the internet of 13 years ago. It might be 13 years in the future. It is only the worst day of your life so far, so the societal divisions we face could deepen into catastrophe over the next decade. Humans might just buck its ingrained tendencies and come together to build a more robust, more resilient internet. It could be if you weren't playing.
Some of the best-informed technologists in the industry gave their opinions on what the future public spaces will look like. In the summer of 2021, the PRC collaborated with a university to conduct a survey of technology innovators, developers, business and policy leaders. They were asked if they would be changed in ways that serve the public good in the future.
The results were not unanimous. Sixty-one percent of respondents predicted that things will change for the better by the year 2035, while 18 percent of them argued that digital spaces are evolving in a mostly negative way.
Their concerns centered around four problems: Humans behave selfishly when not tethered by traditional societal norms, the rate of online advancement has confounded society's less tech-savvy members, making them more susceptible to malicious digital systems they don't fully understand, and governments are. Many of the respondents remained hopeful that we will get our collective act together and start acting like grown ups on the internet by the middle of the next decade, despite the fact that few of the respondents held much confidence in society's short term solutions. Three cheers for the bars.
Online interaction is rife with harassment, doxxing, and cyberbullying. A report from the Anti-Defamation League found that two-thirds of US online gaming players have experienced severe harassment with more than half reporting being targeted based on their race, religion, ability, gender, sexual orientation or ethnicity. Politicians, celebrities, athletes, and even the unwilling ones are all fair game for online mobs.
Zizi Papacharissi, professor of political science and professor and head of communication at the University of Illinois-Chicago, said that toxicity is a human attribute.
Tech companies have tried to tackle the issue, but their efforts have been mediocre. In 2012 Riot Games launched a Player Behavior team to help mitigate toxic interactions in League of legends, and in the last year a digital literacy campaign was launched to stamp out cyberbullies, and Facebook continues to throw money, bots, and personal boundary bubbles at its community. What are they going to show for it?
Charles Ess, a professor in the department of media and communication at the University of Oslo, said that the conditions and causes that underlie the multiple negative affordances and phenomena will not change much. The United States has fostered largely unfettered capitalism.
Digital spaces and digital life have often outpaced the understanding and analysis of their intended or unintended impact and hence have far surpassed efforts to rein in their less-savory consequences. Rick Doner, a retired professor, said that the digital innovations are damaging the existing institutions and the potential for stronger institutions down the road.
In the blackbox problem, the decision-making processes of artificial intelligence and software are obscured from the humans who built them. Wisconsin uses the Compas judicial sentencing software.
One of the biggest challenges is that the systems that control these digital spaces have become unintelligible.
People have historically reacted poorly to emerging technologies, whether it was the new normal or whether 5G wireless caused the COVID-19 pandemic.
Randall Gellens, director at Core Technology consulting, said that there is ample evidence that many humans are susceptible to demagog and sociopaths.
During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Gellens points out the emergence of zoombombing. We saw many self-proclaimed experts who did their own research and who were just asking questions on social media.
Gellens noted that better education, especially honest teaching of history and effective critical-thinking skills, could mitigate this to some degree, but those who benefit from this will fight such education efforts.
Gellens predicted that the interactions between America's elected representatives and the heads of various social media companies would be reasonable. Hearings regarding Section 230, which governs the liability social media companies face for their users' posts in October 2020, were little more than a partisan circus. The hearings without the CEOs in attendance were only marginally more productive, but neither event led to substantive changes in how social media companies operate or how the federal government regulates their actions.
Richard Barke, an associate professor in the School of Public Policy at Georgia Tech, commented to Pew that laws and regulations might be tried, but they change more slowly than digital technologies and business practices.
There is little political inertia to do anything about social media being dead to rights. There is a concern among the respondents of the Pew survey that the technology and policy differences may lead to the weaponization of data and accelerate America's transition to a surveillance state.
The collapse of the Soviet Union has led to a new kind of arms race. David Barnhizer is a professor of law and founder of an environmental law clinic.
Sam Punnett, retired owner of FAD Research, said it was like trying to negotiate a mutually-assured-destruction model with several dozen nation-states holding weapons of mass destruction.
Bad actors run rampant on the internet because of the ineffectiveness of our elected officials in regulating it and the erosion of societal norms. Chris Labash is an associate teaching professor of information systems management at Carnegie Mellon.
Negative evolution of the digital sphere may be more widespread and more harmful than positive evolution, according to him.
Whether the bad actors are from terror organizations or hate groups, these spaces have become digital roach holes that research suggests will only get larger and more divisive. The number of less-thoughtful people who will become radicalized by these spaces and their denizens is more concerning.
It will take more than sending good vibes into the ether to counter this effect. It will take strategies, incentives and dialogue that is expansive and persuasive to attract those people and subtly educate them in approaches to separate real and accurate inaccurate information from that which fuels mistrust, stupidity and hate.
The experts raised a number of frightening points, but their predictions were in the minority of respondents to the survey. The majority of people had a positive view of the future of the internet, but with some reservations. While we face significant challenges, users, governments and companies will eventually step up to do what is necessary and socially acceptable, even if done out of self interest.
Jenny L. Davis, a senior lecturer in sociology at the Australian National University, said she expects platforms to be better regulated internally. This is necessary to sustain public support, commercial sponsorships and a degree of regulatory autonomy.
In the next 10 to 15 years, we will learn to harness digital spaces in better, less polarizing manners, according to the professor of innovation, design and management at the University of SouthernDenmark.
The need to be vigilant isn't going to go away for a long while, he conceded.
The Internet Hall of Fame inductee and former CTO for the Federal Communications Commission argued that social media companies could do a lot towards that goal. Other people are drawn to dark places because of misinformation, hate and fear. All major platforms could make the version easier to choose.
The problem with these sorts of solutions is that they have to be implemented by the social media companies themselves, which have traditionally shown little concern for anything other than their bottom line.
The issues of privacy, autonomy, net neutrality, surveillance, sovereignty, will continue to mark the lines on the battlefield between community advocates and academics on the one hand, and corporations wanting to make money on the other. Chris Arkenberg is a research manager at the Center for Technology Media and Communications.
He said that the largest social media services will continue spending to make their services more appealing to the public and to avoid regulatory responses that could curb their growth and profitability.
Susan Price, human-centered design innovator at Firecat Studio, said that changes could be led by the users themselves.
Price believes that new platforms and apps will be able to set themselves apart from their competition and attract users.
Barry Chudakov, founder and principal at Sertain Research, was the most audacious suggestion put forth by the canvassed expert pool.
He exclaimed, "Digital spaces expand our notions of right and wrong." Expanding our notion of human rights to include integrities can be accomplished by public audiences. The state of being whole and undivided is a fundamental new imperative in emerging digital spaces.
The Bill of Integrities is a full conceptual framework for creating more civil digital public spaces. We don't know how we would enforce such a bill. Even though we don't currently have all the solutions to the structural problems we face, these challenges are not impossible.
The only way to push our digital spaces in the right direction will be through deliberation, collective action and some form of shared governance.
He said that we need to strengthen our public conversation about what values we want in our technology and use regulation to address problems.
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