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Obama's Legacy: a Research in the History of Technological Change, Internet and Data Gathering from the Perspective of a Political Star

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Obama's Legacy: a Research in the History of Technological Change, Internet and Data Gathering from the Perspective of a Political Star Obama's Legacy: a Research in the History of Technological Change, Internet and Data Gathering from the Perspective of a Political Star. By Rik van Eijk 10003025 Supervisor: dhr. dr. E.F. van de Bilt University of Amsterdam 2015 1 Introduction “I hope we will use the Net to cross barriers and connect cultures...” ...was the answer by Tim Berners-Lee, the major inventor of the World Wide Web, when CNN asked him what he thought the internet's biggest impact would be (CNN 2005). In 1990, the general public was introduced to the World Wide Web, developed in the rooms of CERN in Geneva. Through this world wide web, people could talk, discuss and enhance their opinion on every subject that they wanted. This world wide web became quickly known as the internet. Academics could simply send and peer-review their colleague's publications. E-mail introduced a fast way to send text to a particular person; families all over the world were able to quickly (re)connect when instant messengers took over and webcams were introduced. Companies got involved in the business and started their own websites. Sites became less static, introduced pictures and video’s and designers and programmers improved websites to optimize the user experience. Games focused more and more on a multiplayer function, because the internet allowed people all over the world to play with and against each other. SixDegrees launched personal websites in the 90’s, just like Facebook or Twitter offer today. By selling advertorials based on a specific user data, internet companies, such as Google and Yahoo, form a billion dollar industry. They started to enhance the experience of the internet by their own web browsers and operating systems and by introducing whole new technologies and standards to society, such as Google Glasses or Oculus VR. Almost one third of the world population has access to internet: from a cable, wireless modem connection to 3G connection on a smartphone, the internet is available everywhere. In the winter of 2011 I challenged my 120 Twitter followers to try getting from the online shopping mall Amazon to the website of the University of 2 Amsterdam, without typing the UvA address in the browser, without copying and pasting and without the help of search engines. The only thing that was allowed was clicking. The links on different sites should determine whether it was possible to travel from one site to the other. One of my followers actually tried it and needed fifteen steps to accomplish the journey, whilst it would only have taken one search to accomplish this by the help of a search engine. Try to imagine that you do not want to go to the website of the University of Amsterdam, but want to know the answer to the question whether CERN published a paper of Pluto’s orbit in relation to that of Mars and Venus in 1999 (the answer is no). The point that I want to make is that the current experience of the internet has changed by the implementation of online tools by commercial companies: they make the internet easier to use. These companies, as the short history of the internet above also suggests, use information of people that enter searches in order to better aim their advertorials. The user pays the usage of the service with the information: every piece of information that can be obtained, will be obtained, analyzed and used for marketing purposes. It will be used to read the user and to achieve capital gain. The internet pioneers started with a positive vision The first users of the internet also became the main contributors of the medium. The position of these contributors has been taken over by tech companies, trying to maintain their dominance in internet service and data collection. It is this data collection that recently created a controversy in the discourse of privacy vis-a-vis security. Edward Snowden, a NSA contractor employed by Booz Allen Hamilton, stored classified information which he passed on to journalists of The Guardian, The Washington Post or The New York Times. The discourse of data collection – or the so called big data – shifted from a commercial gain towards a security and privacy issue. The data was not only used to enhance the experience of the internet; to make it easier for people to search what they want; how to communicate and what to share. The information formed the major database for 3 the secret service agencies of the United States and other countries to analyze and correlate when and where security threats were most likely to occur. Snowden revealed that the NSA conducts mass surveillance, by collecting internet and telephone data of their own and of foreign citizens. They even tapped foreign country leaders that were known as allies, such as Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel. The discourse of internet privacy became relevant overnight: everyone, from politicians to newspapers and bloggers, talked about Snowden’s revelations, the effects they had on privacy and the position of governments that were involved. This paper will not discuss the difficult privacy perceptions of the current state of affairs with regard to data collection by commercial companies. Neither will it discuss the history of the Internet, how it should have been used and why it did not turn out that way. Instead, this paper will research the position of one particular man in the internet discourse, a man that has used data collecting technology in such a way that he now holds residence in the most powerful estate of the world. A man that is smart, charismatic, a good public speaker; a man known for his skin color and his position, but who is now in a difficult position regarding the discourse of internet and its freedom, the path he chose and the population’s awareness of the issue. This paper will discuss the current president of the United States, Barack Obama: his accomplishments and failures with regard to his ideology and the way he uses the internet and the digital sphere. The United States plays a major role in the current data collection debate. As the president of the United States, Obama needed to take a stand in the discourse. In his State of the Union address of 2014 he said “That’s why, working with this Congress, I will reform our surveillance programs – because the vital work of our intelligence community depends on public confidence, here and abroad, that the privacy of ordinary people is not being violated”. With this statement he took a stance in internet privacy for US citizens, whilst not devaluing the need of the intelligence community. At the same time, publications such as those of Sabato 4 (2010) and Issenberg (2012) expressed that social media, internet tools and big data played a major role in the campaign strategy for the elections of 2008 and 2012, either to reach out to the voters or to collect donations. This contradiction in Obama’s use of the concept of data, surveillance, social media, appeal to voters and citizens, combined with Obama's background, education, career and his Change and Hope campaign strategy, led to the subject of this master thesis. One of Obama’s main subjects in his campaign was the introduction of a collective, nation-wide health care system. Through his experiences as a community organizer in the South side of Chicago, Obama realized that a collective health care system would solve major problems of the poor. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA, also known as Obamacare) was signed to law by Obama in 2010. The website was launched in October 2013, but faced major technical problems. One part of Obama’s solution was to ask CEOs and other prominent employees of tech companies to advise him on the issue, introducing them into the White House. Among the people that were invited were Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, Reed Hasting, CEO of Netflix and Dick Costolo, CEO of Twitter (Hall 2013). The introduction of these CEOs questions the notion of internet- interpretation by Obama and his administration. As described in the first chapter of this thesis, there are two dominant categories in the current internet-paradigm, as mentioned by Morozov: the cyber-utopians and the internet-centralists. According to Morozov, both categories have an unrealistic view of the internet and its possibilities. Cyber-utopians think of what the internet should be, in all kind of ways – a set of political, social and technological beliefs: Cyber-utopians ambitiously set out to build a new and improved United Nations, only to end up with a digital Cirque du Soleil. Even if true – and that’s a gigantic ‘if’-- their theories proved difficult to adapt to non-Western and particularly non democratic contexts (Morozov 2011: xvii). 5 Internet-centralists not exactly opposes the Cyber-utopianism, but it certainly does not agree with it. Where the cyber-utopians think of the what of the Internet, Internet-centralists think of how practices should be done: Unlike cyber-utopianism, Internet-centrism is not a set of beliefs; rather, it’s a philosophy of action that informs how decisions, including those that deal with democracy promotion, are made and how long-term strategies are crafted. (...) Internet-centralists like to answer every question about democratic change by first reframing it in terms of the Internet rather than the context in which that change is to occur. They are often completely oblivious to the highly political nature of technology, especially the internet, and like to come up with strategies that assume that the logic of the internet, which in most cases, they are the only ones to perceive, will shape every environment than it penetrates rather than vice versa (Morozov 2011: xvii).
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