The Death of Informational Sovereignty

Almost three decades after the first studies related to our experience in cyberspace, we continue to debate the same issues as if they were new. In fact, if they aren't from the perspective of mind-boggling cybernetic progress, they are from the point of view of the slow biological evolution of Homo Sapiens.

In 1995, Pierre-Léonard Harvey published "Cyberspace and Communautics", in which he stated that "the growing complexity of our societies and organizations has led to an increase in the volume of information to be processed" (1), concluding later that "this society also generates an overload of information, which seems to be becoming a worrying social problem, that of the embarrassment of our daily lives and our organizations in general" (1).

In other words, modern cyber-connected society produces an ever-increasing amount of data, compulsively collected by people and organizations at a pace that no longer even allows it to be selected and structured into organized compilations of information for human consultation.

What's more, a digitalized society is also a space for communication and, as the author we're following warns, "communication needs are unlimited, diffuse, abstract, poorly understood and, above all, perpetually growing as society becomes more complex" (1). We communicate an ever-increasing amount of data at a pace that we are humanly incapable of keeping up with.

The road to the Information Society is made up of this dichotomy between the exponential growth of available information and the intensification of its communication.

This information overload was predictable and even inevitable in the hyper-communicational model of the information society. At least we've known this since the 1990s, as the author attests.

The same author said at the time that "means of control are needed. We cannot act and create in uncertainty and chance" (1).

It's true, we've passed the stage of promoting the production of information.

More than just information, which is already abundantly produced and collected, our modern connected way of life requires precise means of verifying and making relevant, current, accurate, and truthful information available in real-time.

This seems increasingly complex, not to say utopian, as confirmed by the toxic proliferation of disinformation in cyberspace.

The solution has consistently been to implement so-called intelligent systems for selecting, verifying, and making information available. From online search engines, social networks, and databases, all the information we access digitally is now filtered by more or less complex electronic systems.

Now that we've reached the era of "Big Data" and the availability of information through mega-applications of artificial intelligence, it's time to ask ourselves if we've achieved the control we wanted.

Or have we lost our informational sovereignty once and for all to the "black boxes" (2) of the "deep learning machines" (3)?

PDV

2024

#direitodigital #sociologiadigital #inteligenciaartificial #ciberespa?o #internet #informa??o

Notas:

(1) HARVEY, Pierre Léonard, Ciberespa?o e Comunáutica, Lisboa, Instituto Piaget, 2002 (tradu??o para português de Isabel Andrade a partir do original francês publicado em 1995), p. 188.

(2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_box

(3) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_learning