Afterword: Developments in autumn 2018

Abstract

I sent this manuscript to Oxford University Press on 29 August 2018. The book emerged in April 2019. Much happened in the interim. I submitted this update on 4 January 2019, summarizing matters of consequence in autumn 2018, as well as important things I learned in that period. A recent Microsoft blog suggests that I was too positive in my portrayal of a shrinking digital divide. In the USA, 35 per cent of the population report they do not use broadband communications at home. Wikipedia continued to grow, fuelled in part by its foundation’s effort to engage underrepresented ‘emerging communities’. Battles in the USA over net neutrality intensified after the federal decision to abandon the policy. The state of California passed a tough net neutrality; the New York state attorney initiated an enquiry asking whether the federal decision had been swayed by millions of fraudulent comments. There were more innovations in sensory substitution to enable digital inclusion. At Caltech, researchers developed a system that allows blind people to receive an audio description of what is in their gaze: the objects appear to describe themselves in words. Women continued their struggle for equality and against gender discrimination in high-tech firms. Despite the importance of digital technologies for seniors to help combat loneliness, and to access banking and other online services, many are still digitally disengaged. Research shows that seniors perceive risk in being online, are reluctant to invest the time needed to gain and maintain digital proficiency, and are sometimes concerned that internet use would be inconsistent with their values, for example, the desire to support local stores. I was also too positive in my analysis of the impacts of sharing and stealing digital media and the power of digital media firms such as Google, Netflix, Facebook, and Amazon (see also the discussions of corporate concentration in Sections 12.9 and 14.12). Professor Jonathan Taplin has summarized how devastating these impacts have been, not just to digital media companies such as music and newspaper publishers, but to media creators such as composers and reporters. Consumer spending on recorded music dropped from almost US$20 billion in 1999 to US$7.5 billion in 2014.