Thursday, March 23, 2017

Cairncross proposes another element that he believes affects our society now. He states that there will be a shift from government policing to self-policing in the digital world. He thinks that there will be to much information on the web and too many people posting in order for the government to regulate content and therefore people will have to police themselves and others to keep the internet aligned with American morals and laws. I believe that Cairncross was accurate in his prediction that government policing would become impossible on the internet, and I also think he was correct in identifying that our society would start regulating our own content. One of the ways in which I think we have started to police ourselves is through social pressure and norms. With the emergence of social media and comment sections of blog posts and articles, authors of content are now held accountable for what they post and write. If someone is writing an offensive article or posting an obscene video online, other people can view it, share it, and then publicly bash him online. Daniel Villatoro, an author of an article that examines self-policing states that, "on the contrary to institutional rules, the responsibility to enforce social norms is not the task of a central authority but a task of each member of the society"(Villatoro255). He is stating that social norms are not enforced by the government, but instead by each member of society, especially online. We are beginning to self-police are selves and others on the internet because we have transferred social norms into the digital world. Although the government cannot provide regulation of all web content, I think that self-policing through social pressure does a good job of regulating the obscene and offensive content online.

No comments:

Post a Comment