Excerpt
Smartphone Nation
Chapter 1 The Digital SupermarketSeptember. Master’s students crowd into a wood-paneled lecture theater. It has hard-backed benches designed likely over a century before anyone owned a computer, let alone brought one to class. And it is here, as students precariously balance their MacBooks atop the ripped knees of light-washed jeans, that I tell them about the internet’s techno-enthusiast beginnings. To start, I often show them an infomercial from the early 1990s called “The Kids’ Guide to the Internet,” which encouraged families to install the internet on their home computers. The ad opens with a jingle, “Take a spin. Now you’re in with the Techno Set. You’re going surfing on the internet!” and then cuts to a family in their living room. They sit on a sofa with geometric-patterned throw cushions. Beside them is a Microsoft desktop computer. “The internet gave us a new world of exciting possibilities,” exclaims Peter, a boy with a blond mushroom cut and an ill-fitting polo shirt. “Now that I’ve gotten on the internet, I’d rather be on my computer than doing just about anything.” His parents smile proudly, as his mother beams, “I haven’t been able to get the kids off it ever since.” The family goes on to speak about how the children have a new global understanding, because they can “talk to people all over the world on chat lines.” The preteens are shown slowly clicking one key at a time to write out an email to President Clinton. And visiting the Smithsonian “without ever leaving home,” as pixelated images of the museum’s archive load jerkily across the desktop screen. But ultimately, the parents are thrilled that their children’s grades and communication skills have apparently improved, offering them a shimmering hope of a college education.
This infomercial acts as a time capsule showcasing the early promise of the internet. And, in many ways, these promises were fulfilled. We are now much more connected to politicians. We can access information and the materials of great institutions remotely. Kids can (for better or for worse) chat to almost anyone anywhere in the world. But the question of whether the internet has enlightened us is up for debate. Whether we are all benefiting from the sum value of global knowledge—or whether, as the media theorist Neil Postman argues, we are amusing ourselves to death—is a complex topic.
Regardless of whether it is primarily a tool or a toy, the internet is largely unregulated relative to any of our other tools or toys. Most of what we consume as citizens is heavily safeguarded by our government and regulatory structures, and though there are new pieces of legislation emerging to protect some aspects of use (which I’ll get to), much of the regulation around our digital consumption falls short of measures routinely taken for other products and services. One of the arguments for this is that these technologies are still new and emerging. But the World Wide Web, born in 1989, has for more than half of the world’s population been a constant since birth. For more than half of us, not only is it not “new,” we’ve never known life without it. Yet consumer protection in this space is still not fit for purpose.
This is different from most other products (food, medication, terrestrial TV) that we use or ingest as consumers. But perhaps that makes sense, for we are not the consumers here—advertisers are. We are not the consumers. We are the product. Our attention—our minds—are the product, which is being sold to these advertisers. This chapter does two things: It maps the evolution of the Web from a space driven by information sharing to a space driven by advertising, and it outlines the lack of consumer protection and regulation overseeing this space.
That doesn’t mean that you can’t use these technologies. But if you want to play in this space, if you want to navigate this terrain, if you want to climb this mountain, you’re essentially doing so without a harness. This doesn’t mean that you can’t take the risk, but there is a greater duty of responsibility and care for yourself and for any dependents that you have when using these services. You are not looked after, so you’re going to have to look after yourself and those you love. And this book gives you the tools to do just that.
Consumer Protection“Consumer protection” refers to the act of protecting consumers from unfair commercial practices. It “prohibits misleading actions [and] misleading omissions and bans a number of practices”—for example, faulty products, products or services that aren’t as advertised or aren’t sufficiently transparent, or exhorting children to use certain products like tobacco or alcohol. Regulations govern much of what we use or put into our bodies. Globally, regulations around medication and health care products are overseen by regulators with an alphabet soup of acronyms: the FDA in the United States, the MHRA in the UK, the PDD in Canada, the TGA in Australia, and the CDSCO in India. They are responsible for securing a safe supply chain for medicines and medical devices. Most important, with all of these organizations it can take years for new medicines to go through the research, clinical trials, and licensing process to ensure they are safe and up to standard. And though it is by no means perfect, the FDA’s mission is to protect the nation’s public health by ensuring the safety, efficacy, and security of human drugs, biological products, and medical devices, and it pledges that medication will not be accessible to us as consumers until it is deemed safe.
The acronyms don’t end with health regulators. Internationally there are agencies that ensure that vehicles and their safety equipment are indeed safe. From the NHTSA in the United States, to the RVS in Australia, to the MoRTH in India, to the NRCS in South Africa, to the DVSA in the UK, it’s standard to regulate the things we use in everyday life. We could look to products for children, which come with age recommendations and guidelines on small, esophagus-sized parts. Or predigital, or “traditional,” media (television, radio, and film), which has much more structured regulation by way of the FCC, which ensures standards in prime-time viewing slots and a duty of care across broadcast media. This will be discussed in more detail later in this book.
Globally there are regulators, like the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), that protect public health in relation to food. There are checks and balances in place at a national level to ensure the government has the power to act in the consumers’ interests at any stage in the food production and supply chain. This means that food can’t be labeled, advertised, or presented in a way that is false or misleading. And so, though we could get into a more nuanced discussion about preservatives or ultraprocessed food, you are unlikely to find arsenic in your orange juice or a razor blade in your bread roll on your trip to the grocery store.
For digital technology, instead of testing to prove something is safe prior to hitting the market, the tech industry has not been called into question until its products are deemed to be unsafe. That is different from almost everything else that we buy or put into our bodies. The internet and social media, which followed it, were not tested by government agencies. And they are (for the most part) unregulated. In fact, this was the virtue of the internet from its inception—a free speech utopia, unlike the terrestrial media that came before it.
What is important for us to collectively understand is that regulations that have been thought through and considered—regulations about what is healthy for us to watch—have effectively been thrown out of the window. For many of us now no longer watch terrestrial TV. Children for the most part are more likely to be found on YouTube or YouTube Kids. And because kids are now likely to be watching content not during children’s viewing hours but rather on unregulated platforms on tablets (or phones), as former Google employee Tristan Harris has argued, most of the quite well-thought-through regulation around children’s viewing no longer protects kids. This is the same for all of us with our online usage. This is not a space that was regulated for our best interests; rather, it was manipulated by tech companies in order to hold our time and attention as long as possible for their financial gain.
