The Day Reality Swallows Up Digital" Overview and Impressions
Shocked by the news of the LINE personal information leak that has been making the rounds recently, I asked a friend of mine who used to work for an IT company about this issue. He recommended a book to me as a good place to start thinking about this issue.
It was a book titled "Yabai Digital: The Day Reality Will Be Swallowed Up" by the NHK Special Reporting Team, published by Kodansha Gendai Shinsho.
Amazon's introduction to the book states
Your life is only 2.74 GB (gigabytes).
The amount of data generated in one year in 2020 is "50,000,000,000,000 GB".Digital technology will make our society freer and richer.
However, we are now being made to realize that this was indeed a fleeting wish.The spread of social networking has blurred the boundary between "truth" and "fake," and we have come to dance around "fake.
Information that has lost its context and become fragmented is "liked" and spread around the world as if it were the truth, even if it is a hoax.
Search history stored in big data is becoming a "digital twin" = data that knows more about us than we do, and our privacy is being laid bare.
Despite this, we cannot escape the benefits of digital.
Fakes are rampant, privacy is being stripped away, and the real is being eroded by the digital. How should we live in this illiberal and undemocratic world?
AmazonProduct Page.
Last year saw the emergence of an amazing amount of hoaxes and fake news, starting with the coronavirus and continuing with the U.S. presidential election. I myself was so confused by the information that I honestly had no idea what was right and what was false.
The first half of the book traces the mechanism of why such fake news is created and spread.
Among them, I was particularly impressed by the following passages.
Why is it that such information (*posts that slander people infected with coronas. (*Posts that slander people infected with coronary disease. We asked Fujio Toriumi, an associate professor at the University of Tokyo who specializes in SNS analysis, to analyze the situation.
First, Dr. Toriumi conducted an analysis of the tendency of what kind of tweets are likely to be spread out of the enormous 120 million tweets related to the new type of coronavirus. He analyzed the sender's emotions from the text of the tweets and classified them into 10 categories, including "anger," "joy," "surprise," and so on.
The results revealed that while feelings of "like" and "relief" spread little, it was "negative feelings," especially "anger," that spread most (see Figure 1-2 on the next page). For example, when the percentage of tweets retweeted more than 1,000 times was calculated, the most popular "anger" tweets were three times more common than the least popular "like" tweets (next page, Figure 1-2).
Further analysis revealed that posts that attacked infected users spread at a high rate.
Kodansha Gendai Shinsho, NHK Special Reporting Team, "Yabai Digital: The Day Reality Will Be Swallowed Up," p. 27
Anger and other negative emotions tend to spread.
Those who create hoaxes and fake news take advantage of such "human tendencies.
Just now I am in the process of updating my article on Lenin, who was also a master at inciting anger and hatred among the masses. He encouraged class warfare, violence against traitors, and rallied support by provoking popular discontent.
I felt a chill run down my spine as I saw the connection between Lenin and social networking sites.
And in the second half of the book we are told that our personal information is almost completely naked.
Analyzing smartphones, the Internet, location information, and apps can reveal as much of the user's human profile as possible. The author states
I can tell you where you live, your family structure, hobbies that even those around you don't know about, your annual income, your medical history, and even your relationships with the opposite sex. How would you feel if someone you just met said this to you? In fact, the time has already come when all you need is the data from your smartphone's usage history and you can act like a fortune teller. It is now possible to create a "digital twin," or "another you," in a digital space and analyze your personality.
Kodansha Gendai Shinsho, NHK Special Reporting Team, "Yabai Digital: The Day Reality Will Be Swallowed Up," p. 108
Google, Amazon, and other giant companies collect and analyze vast amounts of information.
Privacy is no longer yours. Your privacy is exposed."
(Privacy is not private. Privacy is public)Many people may think that no matter how much of their privacy is held by a company, it is not a problem if it is only used to deliver advertisements. Also, as discussed below, many IT companies are taking various measures to protect the privacy of their users. But what would happen if our "digital twin" were to fall into the hands of a malicious company? What happens if state authorities misuse it? Mr. Zubov's awareness of these issues seemed to look further into the future.
Kodansha Gendai Shinsho, NHK Special Reporting Team, "Yabai Digital: The Day Reality Will Be Swallowed Up," p. 149-150
The book talks about the protests in Hong Kong where many arrests were actually made due to smartphone data. Information control is already being exercised by the state. This is no longer a future story depicted in science fiction novels. It is a problem that confronts us today.
The trouble, however, is that smartphones have become an infrastructure and cannot be easily let go of.
To be honest, I don't know what to do about it myself.
However, the recent incident of LINE's leak of personal information provided a great opportunity to think about this.
A friend recommended this book to me, saying, "I read this book in one sitting as if I were reading a horror novel," and that is exactly what it was! I was right! It was a very interesting book. This is exactly the kind of book I recommend in this day and age. Please pick up a copy.
A big thank you to my friend who introduced me to this book.
The above is "The Day the Digital "Reality" Will Be Swallowed Up," in which personal information is laid bare - the fear of an information management society.
Related Articles
