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"I fear someone in a garage who is devising something completely new."
Bill Gates, 1998
The internet had been used in a limited way in defence and academic circles for about 30 years, before Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1989.
This week we're going to examine a modern, skeptical account of the growth of major technology companies, technological solutionism.
The term technological solutionism was coined in 2013 by Evgeny Morozov, a Belarusian writer and academic. He argues that the promise of technology to drive progress and solve problems has been over-estimated.
Morozov accuses tech advocates of burying the debate over the internet in "obscure and unproductive McLuhanism that seeks to discover some nonexistent inner truths about each and every medium under the sun." (2013, p19)
Morozov says this leaves us looking for solutions to problems that aren't really there, and that could cause other unforeseen issues.
For example, Morozov is critical of self-tracking devices, such as Fitbits or Telematics boxes.
What are the solutions that Fuchs provided to demonopolize Google and make it less exploitative?
Reading:
Social Media: A Critical Introduction
(Fuchs 2014)
Chapter 6 - Google: Good or Evil Search Engine?
Internet Live Stats
Google Street View
Larry Page (38.5 billion) and Sergey Brin (37.5 billion)
The DotCom crash
Flickr/Husky