Big Data and Privacy and Mediated Spaces Book Reviews

          After listening the Big Data and Privacy group talking about their book, it made me think about a lot of things, and as they mentioned, there are a lot of barriers and taboo’s in the Internet. Barriers like culture, language, ethnicity, and may other are major factors. I can definitely see that and understand due to the fact that certain website is restricted in language, and other websites are made only for certain ethnicities or culture, and that is a huge barrier for the use of Internet. The part that interested me the most was about how some ethnicities rather have more privacy than others. They talked about how white Americans, in general, don’t have any problems sharing information about them, while African Americans are more reserved when questions like “What do your parents work?” or “What do you do during your free time?” The biggest example they showed was demonstrated in a video about the American mentality that people should not talk about money or salaries. It was very interesting to me to see how this is a taboo topic, but that, in fact, is not helpful at all, because it might bring some negative consequences. The fact that people rather talk about their relationships with others, than about the money they make. I connected this topic with social media and I came up with a lot of questions: “if people still value their privacy what are they so exposed in social media?” “why are people always posting and sharing things about themselves if they don’t want their information all over the internet?” A lot of studies were made by the writer of their book and what I learn the most from it is that the Internet is full of barriers that sometimes you cannot avoid.

          The second presentation was about the book “Future Perfect” by the Mediated Spaces group. From what I understood as a global idea of this book is that technology lets us visualize new methods to solve problems and new methods for communication. They also talk about how technology and networks can bring a lot of negative consequences and a lot of “evil” can come from it, but a bigger “good” is the ultimate goal, which is to progress and get a better future. They also talked about how we are competitive, but work together, and thinking of the Internet, everyone creates a different website, and sometimes is better than others, sometimes is worst, but at the end of the day, all of this competition is what makes the internet valuable and useful.