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Law in the Internet Society
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The Truman Show-- By MengyiTu - 14 Oct 2019 It is 8:02 pm. I decided to start writing this essay at 6:40 pm. Between 6:40 and 8:02, I facetimed my husband who works in D.C., browsed Amazon for a mattress topper (but did not buy one), watched a YouTube? video, checked my Instagram account at least three times, the email alert on the right top of my laptop screen popped up at least six times, and I clicked immediately every single time. I have a phone and a laptop. They are both connected to the Internet. I keep chargers at hand so they never shut down, even at night when I sleep. I am not unaware of how the Internet has shaped me. If I am not connected, I may have written half of my essay by now instead only the first paragraph. The Internet is full of distractions, and I am becoming more and more susceptible to them as I become older. The Internet is constantly trying to educate me. It tells me what I should eat for breakfast, what I should wear, how to cook my broccoli, and how to have a happy marriage… I obtain information and knowledge from the Internet, as well as my anxiety. I was born and raised in mainland China, where there is no Facebook, Instagram, YouTube? or Google. I spent the first 21 years of my life living without them. But now I am addicted to them, and I cannot imagine a life without them. For family reasons I have decided to go back to China after law school, but I was so concerned that I would lose access to those websites that I have chosen Hong Kong as my destination. A New York Times article on the app TikTok? illustrates how many of us fell trap to the Internet. First, it makes one feel “the fear of missing out”. When one feels that everyone else is part of something, he or she will begin to wonder why he or she is not. After one is in, the app will “assertively answer anyone’s what should I watch with a flood.” The first thing TikTok? presents when you open the app is an algorithmic feed based on videos you have interacted with, or even just watched. “It never runs out of material. It is not, unless you train it to be, full of people you know, or things you’ve explicitly told it you want to see. It’s full of things that you seem to have demonstrated you want to watch, no matter what you actually say you want to watch.” The app “constantly learning from you and, over time, builds a presumably complex but opaque model of what you tend to watch and shows you more of that.” It is “a version of Facebook that was able to fill your feed before you’d friended a single person.” Do we know ourselves better than the apps on our phone? Probably not. The apps we use every day are turning us in directions we are not aware of. We look at things the apps want us to look at. We live in ways the apps want us to live. We have become human beings that the apps want us to become. But what can we do about it? Is there a cure? Even if there is cure, will we be willing to take it, or have we gone too far? An individual may be willing to give up his or her privacy for convenience, but the value of privacy and freedom for the entire human race is incomparable. Or maybe crisis must erupt before reconstruction will be commenced.Imagine a draft that you wrote after you had taken a week off from the jangle of your net. How would your writing on this subject be different if you had the certainty that you are not made by the technology, but by your habits, just as we all always were, whatever those habits were? How would the substance, as well as the style, of your thought change if you recovered your preceding understanding of the flow of time? Then imagine a draft in which you have resumed the use of the technology, the hardware and the software, but modified so that your own rhythms of thought were not disturbed by notifications and demands to engage. Imagine that you had the power of the net, but no ads, no distractions or disturbances, but only the ability to do what you want when you want to support your thinking about what you want. This would be my Net. Imagine what you would write if you lived there. Now, be where you are, just there and nowhere else, for ten small minutes. Just there, just now, meditating in silence. Write again. You are entitled to restrict access to your paper if you want to. But we all derive immense benefit from reading one another's work, and I hope you won't feel the need unless the subject matter is personal and its disclosure would be harmful or undesirable. To restrict access to your paper simply delete the "#" character on the next two lines:
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