How Do We Live in the Age of the Global Risk Society?
Preventing, managing and mitigating the effects of cyber risk, a risk of our own making, is a great challenge for individuals, businesses and countries worldwide. How much time do we devote to questioning the new way of life in modern society? Indeed, how much do we know about who is reshaping us, how and for what purpose, cutting cloth after cloth we have never known and putting it on us as a garment? Are we going to cling to the question ‘What is happening to us?’ only after we have crashed into the wall without reckoning with the dynamics of society and the limits of the science of modernity?
Are we aware of how, and to what kinds of transformations for people and societies, the age we live in is playing host? As Prof. İoanna Kuçuradi also stated in her address: “What do I see when I look at what is going on in the world? Postmodernism has come and has run up against its limits. Many people are not aware of what they are doing. When we look at what is going on in the world, we see that people regard every kind of action, every kind of idea as being of equal value. Yet not everything is of equal value. It is not ‘Anything goes’, as Post-Modernism says. That is, not everything goes, it does not work, it cannot be! There is such a thing as knowing our place. This is what has been removed, and now everything is possible, anything can happen.”
The legacy left to the digital world from the 20th century: “Anything goes, ‘I did it, so it is done! Whatever anyone goes through is of no importance at all. Whatever you throw out there will find its place in society.” For the one who sees, this is an inner ache; for the one who does not, it is simply a way of life …
In the age of the risk society, have we been able to see the danger that will arise from ignorance leaving individuals and societies deprived of intervention in, and criticism of, technological, scientific and industrial advances? Or did we crash into the limits because we also failed to notice that excessive information, and the unquestioning use of that information, is at least as bad and dangerous as ignorance?
It is precisely the theory of the ‘Risk Society’, the product of an effort to live while bumping time and again against such limits, that starts from the thesis that modernity and its institutions have passed to a far more advanced stage than they were at in the beginning, that modernity has become radicalized, and that the stage thus reached has therefore carried humanity into an age of uncertainties in which possible future consequences cannot be foreseen. What is more, the uncertainties in question are uncertainties manufactured by modernity, or by modern man in his effort to dominate nature. Uncertainties manufactured by human beings, whose source is not natural, have given rise to possible major risks that are defined by examples such as the Chernobyl disaster, global warming and desertification, and whose consequences cannot be foreseen. The society of the age of manufactured uncertainties is the risk society. As for the theory of the risk society, its architects, the German sociologist Ulrich Beck and the British sociologist Anthony Giddens, took it as their duty to grasp the importance of conceptualizing ‘reflexive modernity’ and ‘radicalized modernity’, and, with a holistic view of modern society, gave notice in book after book of the extinction towards which humanity is being dragged.
As technology develops continuously, we want to make use of it to make our lives easier and more successful. The data we provide to the organizations we use for social and commercial purposes is becoming more important, but at the same time the risk is growing too.
While this causes problems at the personal level for individuals, as the trust on which relationships depend is breached it also creates serious knock-on effects for business and society. Ulrich Beck, with the data he obtained by observing the course of this coming danger, points out that perceptions of risk can change the future development of systems, technologies and social structures.
According to Giddens, modernity is structurally globalizing, and the unsettling consequences of this phenomenon combine with the circularity of the reflexive character of modernity to form a universe of events in which risk and danger take on a new structure. The globalizing tendencies of modernity are simultaneously both extensive and intensive in nature; they connect individuals to large-scale systems as part of a complex dialectic of change both locally and at the poles.
In the belief that sharing data makes life easier, while it provides more comfort and ease of connection, we also forget that data is our personal property. Are we aware that if it falls into the wrong hands we are faced with very high costs, physically, financially and psychologically? This includes the restriction of an individual’s rights, discrimination, identity theft or fraud, financial loss, damage to reputation and significant economic or social disadvantage.
The pandemic was the best solution for getting the great majority of the public to carry on their daily lives online by necessity. We need to understand the matter without overlooking, education first and foremost, the employees of public and private organizations, and also the segment that, saying “life is digital now” even if it does not work, obliges itself at least as much as those who are online out of necessity. In the online model of life, the information collected, and the place where this information is kept – a pool, a cloud, pots and pans, however it takes shape in whoever’s mind… Here is yet another concept of the new world!
What matters is that we know the functionality of these concepts and what we are facing. That Big Data – the large data pools – are highly attractive to cybercriminals who want to steal personal information and make money from it. Or, while those who by selling this data make money beyond counting, the ‘what-shall-I-call-money’ crowd, multiply their fortunes, what do the law and the statutes say about this situation? Do we know? What are the human rights, or the legal system, of the New Digital World like? Where is the function of punishment and sanction? Its robed officials, such as the lawyer, the judge, the prosecutor…? The threat environment is constantly changing. In the new digital world, the information given yesterday by any expert who carried out due diligence may not be safe today.
Have we ever thought about by what incentive Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and the other social networks, which enable our social media data to be sold to advertisers and third parties, keep individuals producing data by instilling a feeling of fun and freedom? Do we know that users, through the acts of uploading pictures and videos, commenting and liking, are the workers who labour unpaid through long nights to increase the advertising revenues of the giant companies of social media?
Thus the product/information produced is exploited by capital, as in every century. Exploitation is the exploiter’s appropriation to himself of part or all of a good or piece of information that has been produced in common. The companies, firms or brands that use immaterial labour, also called information labour, by offering ‘free’ use will both have the digital content produced by the social media users who generate content through advertisements and, on top of that, the legal rights to all the personal information that is the private property of the users will be theirs as well! In return for nothing more than the freedom to use their programs free of charge and to be able to message or communicate …
As a result of this great wave of migration from the real world to the virtual world brought about by the movement of globalization, will our digital immigrants, our first native digital activists, and the virtual expatriates who have reached the final outcome of their own reality be inscribed by ‘google’ on the pages of history, I wonder, with their distinctive stories turned into epics? While the native activists born into the digital world have internalized the virtual world’s illusion of reality, do the digital immigrants experience any problems in their new ways of life? Is there a method, determined by the natives, for the effort that the digital immigrants who cannot ‘update’ their daily lives with their technological devices make in order to enter the contemporary community (tribe) of the natives? Everyone, Generation Y included, knows well that tribalism is an influential force. It creates a sense of belonging, identity, family, community, teams and nations, but at the same time it can also lead to discrimination, violence, wars and genocides. A brand tribe: the specialized knights of geographical attachment, resting on a set of social relations established among those who like a brand…
When we compare today with the past, we now live in a New Digital World that can be far more comprehensively destructive and that has been built with extremely high risks. A significant part of the risks in question is the result of humankind, together with its war of modernization, chasing ever greater profitability within the capitalist cycle. The risk of attachment to the indispensable consumer objects of modern patterns of life is, more than the pollution of nature, the ever-increasing population of those who live in a world of the mind so full of rubbish that one cannot pass through it. We have not even reached a consensus on the necessity of facing weapons of mass destruction, nuclear dangers and ever-growing poverty not in the future but right now. Indeed, we have no idea at all – that is the most bitter truth of the matter… But the important question here is how we ought to comprehend all these negativities and on what kind of consciousness the stance we take against them ought to rest.
In short, it is exactly the time to think…
Keywords: Digital Risk Technology
Translated from the Turkish original.