Food for Thought: For you and your students lives.

This week's Food for Thought is as much for you and your family as a member of society as much as it is for you as an educator. As a school and through our learning principles we encourage students to critically think and learn things that will challenge them. Through this process they can learn who they are as individuals and hopefully become empowered. However, there are certainly forces working in the opposite direction that would like all members of society to be predictable, easily led and compliant to the dictated norms of society.

Hence I want to share an interesting article and through it a good book.I think that you will find the article interesting and if you want to go deeper I have a soft copy of the book, “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power”

There is so much that we have been misled about and the more I read, the more worried I become about the our future and our students' freedom. I have always been a bit of a conspiracy thinker, because being working class, I never trusted the rich or the authorities. 

But now with big data and AI in the hands of governments and corporate giants some of my fears may be coming true. 

In the article, How Big Tech Built the Iron Cage, there is plenty to think about regarding the erosion of our personal privacy and how it has all been allowed to happen to us all. Here is how the article concludes:

"Indeed, most of us don’t want to live like this, heads bent over a handheld device, twitching from one social-media outlet to another. Insidiously, though, the technologies that mediate our existence provide an illusory sense of mastery, as we tap a screen and summon brightly colored sweaters to our door. “The precise moment at which our needs are met,” Zuboff writes, “is also the precise moment at which our lives are plundered for behavioral data.” We find ourselves in an elegantly designed, frictionless trap."

Having shared the article with a few people I was then sent this video from  'State of Surveillance' with Edward Snowden and Shane Smith (VICE on HBO: Season 4, Episode 13) which is a must watch if you want to know more about how we are all being watched and tracked through the technology we are using. This links with several other sources that I have shared with you this year, and although a bit older than some adds further evidence that points to the fact that our privacy is being eroded systematically and deliberately by governments and corporations and there is little that we can do about it. The video ends with the question that Snowden raised at the time of his revelations about the NSA, today's government might be ok but who says that is going to be the same in the future, and he jokes about what would happen if Donald Trump came to power.

How many of you knew the information that has just been shared? As always I come back to what are we doing in school? How many of our graduates are aware of the deeper dangers of all the 'cool' technology that they surround themselves with and use everyday? have they thought about protecting their freedom? Then of course we have to ask how are our digital citizenship courses in homeroom and advisory approaching these questions? By having 1:1 tech from Grade 3 are we doing our students a dis-service or can we use it to ensure they are aware and know how to have technology in their lives but without being controlled by it? So many questions that we need to answer as we prepare students for their future.