Why

 

# The Web is Designed as A Money Making Machine

Web 2.0 tools and services, such as search engines and social media networks, are not public utilities or services established for the public good. Behind the Web 2.0 there is no web design thinking aiming to foster users creativity and to facilitate social interactions, but instead a neoliberal financial thinking whose ambition is that Internet becomes a tool for mass control and an instrument for the production of marketable data. In fact, there is nothing like a free service. If the service is free then you are the product. Web 2.0 tools are not conceived to serve as the custodians of public trust but rather to simply be money-making machines.

 

# Personal Data is The New Currency

Social media networks build up extremely detailed profiles of your behaviour, preferences, and opinions, before packing it and turning you into a collection of data, that is, a product ready to be bought and sold in the market. Data tracking firms are ubiquitous on the Web and are able to combined data from different social networking accounts to build extensive, long-term identified profiles of you linking your on-line and offline activity.

Your personal data is extracted and transformed into merchantable demographic groups by corporations, marketers, security agencies, and governments to market their strategies and identify new opportunities. Tracking tools, such as cookies, hard to delete super cookies or zombie cookies, in combination with data processing techniques, such as sentiment analysis, are currently being used to determine your attitudes and preferences with respect to economical, commercial and ideological decisions.

By facilitating free quantification tools and services, social media networks, marketers, and corporations carry on sucking your data to infinitely commodify our privacy. Personal data is the new currency, the merchandise that data brokers buy and sell, and an essential component in the current neoliberalist global economic model of the Web.

 

# In the Data Production we are Slaves

Since social media networks make money from selling data about their users’ usage, their main interest is to have as many users as possible pouring as much personal data as possible into their platforms. In order to increment the number of users, they offer free services, unlimited storage space and the ability to customize their on-line personas.

To increase the speed and rate of personal data production, social media networks formats and data structures encourage personal branding, the practice of individuals marketing themselves and their careers as brands by migrating their personal data to the networks. Personal branding operates within what is called emotional capitalism, “a culture in which emotional and economic discourses and practices mutually shape each other” (Illouz, 2007, p. 5). Web 2.0 pushes us towards a particular kind of individualism in which economic and political models of bargain and exchange increasingly define our emotional and social lives.

Social media networks have not been forced upon us. We have given away the rights over our personal data in exchange for getting experiences perfectly tailored to our personal preferences and needs. However the currency that our personal data has become is not for us to use. In the Web 2.0 we have become the data production machines ourselves. We are now submissive data slaves and so far it seems there is no way back. Protecting or taking control back over our personal data in the age of big data remains a seemingly impossible task. Privacy is not a choice, actually is not even an option anymore, tracking is ubiquitous and cannot be switched off.

 

#There is not an Easy Way to Understand and Avoid Tracking

Unfortunately there is not an easy way for Internet users to understand how tracking works and how to avoid it. Although these issues are already examined by technological and social sciences, the outcomes of their research projects usually take the form of either highly technical or almost philosophical reports. On the other hand, many of the steps that are required to protect one’s online privacy are quite difficult to follow and implement. In order to be substantially aware about how the Web 2.0 system works and to be partially protected against tracking mechanisms, the user would need to be intellectually and technologically very engaged and up-to-date.

 

# The Paranoid Narcissist State

In order to have us pouring as much personal data as possible and increase data production, social media networks demands inclusion, participation, and induce interactivity. In the Web 2.0 all resources and information are theoretically available and the individual is supposed to partake in the system by having a personal approach about everything.

The unease to stay continually connected with others through the social media in order to not end up being the one missing rewarding experiences or opportunities defines our current digital society. The users’ paranoid narcissist state is especially characterized by an excessive preoccupation in one's appearance, the anxiety of being expose and the fear of missing out (FoMO). The paranoid narcissism state is not the exception, but the norm.

 

# Surveillance Through Aestheticization

In the social media, control occurs through computational protocols, data acquisition and algorithm analysis that distribute and manage the individual within the Web 2.0. Even when the primary means of control in the social media networks are not visual, the visual is the tool that allows control. Social media networks, corporations, and marketers have understood this and are embracing a world of visual communication by creating high-quality, compelling images in your digital media.

Within the social media networks, everything becomes a marketing tool for the self. The individual has adapted and appropriated this state of control through the aestheticization and the fashionability of the self. Aestheticization becomes the way to adapt to the state of surveillance. In the context of the Web 2.0 the visual is the primary mean of engagement, without the visual control cannot run across us.

How

# Awareness and Self-Defence

Digital citizens today have a fundamental role to play in determining what kind of data society we want to live in. We can resign ourselves to being passive consumers and merchandise of data brokers, marketers, and corporations we would never have chosen to trust if we would have given the opportunity. We need to exercise our right to know how our behaviour and personal data is being exploited and protect ourselves by participating in the discussion of what the digital future should look like.

However, nowadays there is not an easy way to gain knowledge about the mechanisms and purposes of social media networks. In order to be substantially aware about how the Web 2.0 system works and to be protected against tracking mechanisms, the user would need to be intellectually and technologically very engaged and up-to-date. Consequently, the vast majority of Internet users will continue to partake in a system where the imperative of participation and voicing one’s opinion is imposed to everyone and therefore will continue to be tracked by thousands of companies they have never heard of, companies they have no relationship with, companies they would never trust enough to give them information about their most private thoughts and habits.

 

# Web 2.0 Tools and Services Success

So, how can we afford gaining knowledge and take control over such complex system? The answer lies within the Web 2.0. The Web 2.0 has allowed us to do technical operations that were considered very complex by the vast majority of people just few years ago: constructing a website, filming and editing video, manipulating images, calculating routes in maps, making surveys, presenting complex data, establishing platforms, extracting and sharing information, accessing or moving through libraries.

The success of the Web 2.0 has been precisely that of creating easy-to-use computer-, mobile-, and web-based-mediated tools that has allowed people to create highly interactive platforms through which individuals and communities share, co-create, discuss, and modify user-generated content in virtual networks. The facts of being both free and easy-to-use have been crucial since that have leaded anyone to access, create, modify, and share diverse digital content within minutes (if not seconds) of deciding.

But what does it mean easy-to-use here? Easy-to-use in the Web 2.0 means much more that easy-to-learn. Easy-to-use in the Web 2.0 is the result of the devolvement interactive software which has embraced a world of visual communications by creating high-quality, compelling images in your digital media interface. Key to this success is that these tools point exactly at one of the main the anxieties of today society: the construction and fashionability of the self.

In the context of the Web 2.0 the visual is the primary mean of engagement. Indeed, in the Web 2.0 itself we found the answer.

 

# Leveraging the Power of Web 2.0 to Drive Sustainability

Web 2.0 tools and services are not intended to serve our interests but rather, to figure out how new products will fit into everyday life and meet our designed future needs. They are a form of propaganda designed to persuade us we will need always more products.

To enable people to expose the structures of power of the social media network and to decide the data society they want to live in, it is necessary to work from within the system and use the tools that Web 2.0 has proven to be successful. To learn about our participation on the construction of the Web 2.0 we will need to use the same tools the system has used to know about us.

Disciplines with visual and aesthetic qualities such as fine art, product design, and design interaction might seem like appropriate mediums to explore these issues. Specifically, the discipline of Interaction design, due to its capacity of dealing with technical, aesthetic, and ergonomic considerations could bring the debate into an everyday context in an accessible way.

 

# Design Question

Consequently the design question reads as follows:

How can we leverage the Web 2.0 to expose structures of power in the context of social media networks?

 

#One Possible Answer

Through easy-to-use, fashionable and critical add-on tutorials.