Is The Splinternet The Future?

Every heard of the Splinternet? An Inc. magazine article paints a different future for those of us who make a living marketing goods or services on the internet.

After all, we help companies with inbound marketing and posting targeted digital content for online searchers who find their website, blog, or social media page. Inc.com contributor Amy Webb defined how the future of the WWW could be a new splinternet. This is something based on people accessing digital content (which used to be through a privately-operated World Wide Web) in new ways. What’s remarkable is these new ways will depend on where you live and could involve users accessing the internet from a local network that doesn’t rely on the far-flung data center for digital content retrieval.

Digging Deeper

We couldn’t base our definition of the splinternet on just one piece, so we took a look around and found this one. A splinternet would be a series of Internets around the world that are fragmented by new government regulations. One’s virtual experience would depend on where you live and attempt to access the internet and on the laws and regulations governing it in that location.

In a CNBC Article, writers explain how the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation began on May 25, 2018. This regulation changes the internet experience, especially by giving users more control over the use of their data. This comes even as stock prices have plunged for social media networks in light of Mark Zuckerberg’s intense questioning over Facebook practices following the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

What Does the Future Look Like?

In its 2018 survey “The Future of Well-Being in a Tech-Saturated World,” Elon University quoted a range of technology professionals and scholars on the subject of whether digital life will be mostly harmful, mostly helpful, or will stay the same when it comes to its impact on our physical and mental well-being. A key theme in selected posts was whether the government will begin to regulate how private organizations manipulate what was supposed to be a democratic internet.

If the internet was supposed to open up popular access to information around the world, it wasn’t supposed to violate their privacy rights when they begin using such access. However, the Facebook example shows this is exactly what happened as large companies manipulate (or data mine) user search habits and use their collective personal data for private economic gain. It’s not so much that the information is collected or analyzed but that it might be sold without a user’s permission to another organization to influence something as important as the election of the President (the leader of the free world). The result of this digital life survey was 47 percent of respondents believed people will be more helped than harmed over the next decade by digital life.

Where Do You Stand?

The question for individuals and for business owners who want to be transparent and to respect consumer rights becomes whether you will continue to use the internet in the same ways. You want to partner with a reliable inbound marketing firm. We can help you consider if you will change your business practices to use inbound marketing techniques that show how your firm respects user data privacy.

What’s more, will you dare to understand how your subscribers’ data could be used or abused by government agencies and private companies? In the words of Judith Donath on the Elon University survey page (she’s the author of “The Social Machine, Designs for Living Online”):

To predict the impact of technology on well-being we need to ask, ‘Who profits from our well-being and who profits from our anxiety?’ As individuals, we prefer improved well-being; who wouldn’t want to be less stressed, happier, healthier and more satisfied with their life?

This post originally appeared on the blog of The Friedman Group, LLC.

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