Digital Culture and its Effects of Contemporary Society

February 27^th 2016 from 1:00 to 3:00 PM we were thoroughly captured by Wil Steele’s presentation on cyber-culture and the effects on society. From what I gathered of his tech blog, cyber-culture is one of his favourite topics of discussion and he masterfully shared tons of interesting information stored in his brain.

We started with cyber-psychology and how people have changed as a result of cyber-culture. We went as far back as the Internet goes when it was originally created to be complete open sourced and free to use as one wished. The object was to allow unfettered access and use completely free of charge; essentially everyone’s computer could act as a server. Governments and corporations didn’t want anything to do with all this free stuff and have created interference for users in one form or another since.

Wil differentiated between the Internet and the world wide web (WWW). The WWW is everything that is available to be view in an Internet browser while the Internet itself constitutes much more include including everything digital such as Usenet, FTP, the dark web …

We sped through the differences between copyright, copyleft and creative commons. These are the various limitations author can use whenever anyone wants to duplicate their original content.

He went through some of the options the government has when dealing with offensive web sites. It’s difficult to shut down a server but fairly common to shut down domain names. Corporations and governments have been squabbling forever about what one or the other can or cannot do. Wil talked about how corporations worry of net neutrality. This is a competition for bandwidth between streamers and service providers. Service providers have started throttling streamers who upload to a degree where uploads are often ten times slower than downloads.

A question regarding how importance could one person’s opinion be in the vast sea of opinion sharing Internaut’s was answered with the saying that it only takes one person to start a movement.

A bit of media control was discussed. It was understood that any digital communication passing through foreign servers can be intercepted and used as grounds for criminal charges. We concluded that an email sent by a .ca email address to another .ca email address would probably be exempted in spite of the message going through foreign servers.

We considered how texting is beginning to render cursive handwriting obsolete to the point that many of today’s children do not write in cursive.

We also determined that the English language is by far the leading business language of the Internet and in itself is constructed to assimilate and suppress other languages.

People are getting physically lazier by the day as a result of mobile privatization; experiencing the world at the comfort of your own couch.

Aside from all that, we covered a bit about DNS (domain name servers), the HTML language and stuff revolving around IP addresses.

We had our regular meal ticket draws and thanked Wil for his amazing presentation.