INTRODUCTION

Social Implications looks at the effect of computers and ICT on the world, your community and yourself. Before continuing with the rest of the chapter, carefully think about the effect of computers and ICT on your privacy and answer the following questions:

• How can ICT invade your privacy?
• Why do people share their information on Facebook or Instagram, for example?
• What are the benefits of social networking?
• What are the disadvantages to social networking?

SOCIAL IMPLICATIONS IN A NUTSHELL

According to the United Nations, globalisation can be defined as an increase in the rate and ease with which people, companies and governments from different countries interact.

Globalisation has been made possible due to two technologies: transportation and improvements in computers and computer networks.

Globalisation has made the world richer, smarter, more connected and more culturally aware than ever before.

Computers make global communication easy and affordable. This has several advantages, including:

• allowing families to keep in touch, even over large distances.
• helping people to keep and maintain larger social networks.
• increasing people’s social and romantic opportunities.
• improving job opportunities, with many young South Africans finding opportunities overseas.
• helping people understand different points of view, with research showing how communicating with different people can increase empathy.

One communication technology that has already had a significant impact and will continue to grow in popularity as internet speeds increase, is video conferencing. Video conferencing allows two or more people to connect to the same video call. This has significant advantages over a typical phone call or teleconference call, including:

• a large part of communication is through facial expressions and body language
• video conferences allow users to visually show what they are talking about.

The benefits of global communication are not just personal. Companies have their own advantages including:

• selling their products to a global (international) audience.
• managing larger, international businesses using video conferences.
• sending critical documents across the world immediately using email.
• quickly transferring and receiving funds between countries and from international customers through online banking.

UNIT
11.1 Computers provide solutions to issues of national and international importance

INTRODUCTION

In Grade 11, you saw how computers can be used to solve real world problems. This included specific case studies on the weather, elections and censuses, but also included a more general discussion of new technologies, including Als that can diagnose cancer and create legal briefs and self-driving cars.
In this section, you will look at two new techniques that programmers use to solve problems:

• Distributed computing
• Decision making

DISTRIBUTED COMPUTING POWER

Distributed computing refers to computer projects where hundreds, or even thousands, of computers across the world work together to solve a problem, for example, the free, online game called Phylo.

In this game, players could use coloured blocks to build DNA and were asked to compare DNA sequences between different species. The closer the match, the higher score players would receive.

While the game itself was interesting, it was a distributed computing project. The goal of Phylo was not just to entertain people, but also to help align DNA sequences correctly and to recognise patterns that computers struggle to recognise. By playing the game, the gamers helped researchers to better understand several different diseases.
Similar distributed computing power has been used to:

• Find a solution for the Ebola virus
• Find a solution for certain strains of childhood cancer
• Find new prime numbers
• Categorise galaxies
• Search for alien life
• Fight AIDS

By allowing people who care about a topic to pool their resources, the creators of these projects gain access to an incredible amount of resources that they might not have had on their own.

DECISION MAKING

Computers have changed, and is continuing to change, human decision making. For thousands of years, people have seen human intelligence and the ability of humans to make decisions as the primary difference between humans from animals. Over the last 30 years, and especially the last 10 years, humans are giving up more and more of their decision-making responsibility to computers. This ranges from decisions as simple as when to do exercise or which road to take to work, to potentially life changing decisions such as which romantic partners would suit you and what job occupations would suit you.

As computers become more intelligent and learn more about us, they will undoubtedly play an even bigger role in human decision making.

11.1.1Match the COLUMN with the correct answer in COLUMN B. Write down only the question number and the matching letter in COLUMN B in your answer book.

11.1.2This activity can either be a discussion in class or learners can answer the questions individually in their homework books.

a.Do your own research and write a paragraph either agreeing or disagreeing with the statements below:

i.Humans will always be able to make better complex decisions than computers.

ii.Soon, computers will be able to do most jobs, including knowledge jobs such as doctors, lawyers and accountants, better than humans.

iii.Soon, your computer and smartphone will be able to analyse all the information It has recorded about you and your friends and provide you with concrete social suggestions such as “You need to spend more time with Mark” or “You and Relebohile would make an excellent couple.”

iv.The more decisions computers can make; the easier life will be for humans.

v.When you allow computers to make too many decisions, you place too much power in the hands of computer programmers.

UNIT
11.2 The evolution of social networking and the effect on society

INTRODUCTION

Using computers, the internet and social websites have made significant improvements to the world. They have made it easier for people to be more social, made it easier to connect with people who are far away, made communication more affordable, made it easier to find a community of similar people, and allowed people to begin building databases of the world’s knowledge. At the same time, it is important to stay aware of the potential risks and problems linked to these improvements.

INFORMATION OVERLOAD

While social networks do allow people to stay connected to their friends, they can also lead to social media information overload. This occurs when there is too much information available, with new messages, photos and notifications demanding your attention every minute of the day. Rather than spend their time productively, people can spend every free minute they have reading social media posts making them less productive, less able to obtain new information, more stressed and can even cause depression!

If you find yourself spending too much time on social media, you can try the following:

• Limit the time you spend on social networks to five minutes, three times a day
• Do not save your username and password, so that you are forced to enter these each time
• Unfollow or mute people who fill your social media page with useless information
• Disable social media notifications on your phone
• Uninstall or stop using any services that do not improve your life

Animation showing five techniques to prevent social media overload:

1.Limit time you spend to 5 minutes

2.Do not save username and password

3.Unfollow or mute people

4.Disable notifications on phone

5.Stop using services that do not improve life.

AVAILABILITY OF PERSONAL INFORMATION

PERSONAL INFORMATION

Social networks like Facebook and Twitter are a great way to keep in touch with friends and acquaintances. They can also be used to meet new people with common interests and talk about the things you have in common. At the same time, unless you specifically change it, most social networks share a lot of the information that you place on their website publicly. This means that anyone on the internet can see this information.

This can result in uncomfortable family moments when your parents see exactly what you did during the holiday with your friends! It can also have more permanent, long-term consequences, such as costing you a job. In today’s competitive job market, there is a growing trend for employers to look at the social media profiles of applicants before making any hiring decisions

Publicly available online information has also been used to commit crimes. Burglars have used tweets or public photos to see when families are away from home or on vacation. This allowed them to burgle houses at a time they knew the houses would be empty. Stalkers have also used publicly posted information (such as tweets or photos on Instagram) to stalk their victims.

GLOBAL COMMUNITY – CULTURAL EFFECTS

Globalisation allows people from across the world to form part of a global community where everyone can share and enjoy other people’s cultures. For example, most people today watch international movies and listen to international music. There are also many people who are interested in and follow international news.

The risk with the global community is that smaller cultures may disappear. In South Africa, especially among young people who rely on the internet for entertainment, many people rarely watch South African television shows or listen to South African music. Many people are also more interested in international than local affairs, and more interested in international celebrities than local celebrities. This constant focus on international entertainment, news and people can increase the cultural attraction to countries with a large cultural impact (such as the United States) while decreasing the power of smaller cultures.

For many people, culture is an important part of a person’s identity, so losing your own culture, or seeing your culture as second to an international culture attacks that identity.

Groups consisting of people with different cultures can improve the groups’ performance.

If all small cultures are swallowed by larger, more dominant cultures, some unique ideas and perspectives on the world could disappear.

SOCIAL WEBSITES AND SOCIAL ENGINEERING

A few examples ways In whichh social engineering is practiced include:

• Baiting: This depends on a victim taking the bait, similar to a fish reacting to a worm on a hook. The person dangling the bait wants to entice the target into taking action e.g. unknowingly downloading malware on a server.
• Phishing: This grabs information from an unwitting victim to seek information that might help with a more significant crime.
• Email hacking and contact spamming
• Pretexting: Is a trick to get someone’s attention so the fraudster can trick the would-be victim into providing something of value.
• Quid pro quo: This scam involves an exchange, I give you this, and you give me that. Fraudsters make the victim believe it’s a fair exchange, but that’s far from the case, as the cheat always comes out on top.

WIKIS

Wikis are encyclopaedias that can be edited by anyone. They can be general encyclopaedias (like Wikipedia) which allows users to create entries for any topic, or they can be very specific, such as the esports Wiki called Liquipedia, which only allows users to add information on the esports-related topics.

Because anyone can contribute information to the wiki, these encyclopaedias can grow incredibly quickly. For example, Wikipedia contributors have written and edited more than 27 billion words across 40 million articles! If the average professional author can write 100 000 words in a year, it would have taken a team of 1 000 professional authors 270 years and hundreds of billions of Rand to create an encyclopaedia as large as Wikipedia. Instead, the information on Wikipedia was written and edited in less than 18 years for free!

Since anyone can update a wiki, they are also easier to maintain and keep up to date. Whenever a large event occurs, hundreds of contributors are ready to update the wiki with the newest information.
This does not, however, suggest that wikis are perfect. Instead wikis are faced with several challenges, including:

• Quality of information: Because anyone can edit the information, many people doubt the quality of information stored on wikis. However, several studies have shown the quality of information on Wikipedia is comparable to that of top encyclopaedias written by experts.
• Bias of editors: Since anyone can edit an article, rather than those with a neutral view of the topic, are most likely to edit the pages. This means that there are often edit wars about controversial topics, with one group of editors writing the article so that the information is positive, and another group so that the information is negative.

While these criticisms have mostly looked at Wikipedia, this is because Wikipedia is by far the largest and best moderated wiki. These issues become even more significant on smaller wikis, where a small number of contributors can have a large impact on the quality of the wiki.

UNIT
11.3 Privacy and Information sharing

INTRODUCTION

Privacy is defined as a person’s ability to control how information about them is shared with other people or institutions.

In South Africa, the privacy of all individuals is protected in Section 14 of the constitution. Furthermore, the Protection of Personal Information Act (or POPI Act) ensures that citizens’ personal information (such as ID numbers, addresses and telephone numbers) may only be used in very specific circumstances.

Privacy becomes a very complicated issue on the internet. Companies who provide services to you for free (like Facebook and Google) often collect information about you when you use these services and sell that information to advertisers.

These companies do not break the law, but rather make sure they follow the letter of the law exactly. They may include a section on how your personal information will be used in the 30-page terms and conditions agreement you sign when you sign-up for their service, or they may ask you who to share information with any time you make a post. However, by using their services, you allow them to sell your information.

In the following section, you will learn more about issues related to privacy and anonymity. Specifically, you will learn how cookies can be used to invade your privacy and the impact of online anonymity.

COOKIES

This has been explained in detail in Chapter 1. Let’s revise this topic briefly. A cookie is a small amount of data generated by a website and saved by your web browser. Its purpose is to remember information about you, similar to a preference file created by a software application.

ANONYMITY

As you know, most websites allow people to use them anonymously. Even when they require people to create accounts, very few websites require people to prove their identity. As a result, people can create accounts with any name or surname they want. This allows greater freedom of expression, but also less accountability for any comments made.

Anonymity offers the following advantages to internet users:

• It allows people to be more honest and have more honest conversations.
• It allows people to give and receive more honest feedback.
• It allows people to seek help and support on personal or embarrassing issues.
• It allows people to have more balanced conversations with all anonymous users being treated equally.
• It allows people to anonymously whistle blow on illegal activities.

However, due to a lack of accountability, anonymity also has several disadvantages:

• It can protect people committing crimes or gathering information about illegal activities.
• It can be used for legal but unethical activities.
• It can be used to make statements that are not socially acceptable, without fear of censure.
• It can be used to target and bully specific people.

In 2011, Google implemented a “real names only” policy on Google+ (its social network). This name would then be used across the range of Google’s services, including Gmail and YouTube. The internet was furious and campaigned against the policy for months. After almost a year, Google softened the policy before removing it completely in 2014.

GLOBAL UNIQUE IDENTIFIERS

A GUID (global unique identifier) is a term used by Microsoft. It is a number that its programming generates to create a unique identity for an entity such as a Word document.

GUIDs are widely used in Microsoft products to identify interfaces, replica sets, records, and other objects.

One concern is that an author of a document can be traced by the GUID in the document, even in circumstances where the author has taken care to maintain their anonymity.

FILE SHARING (MOVIES, MUSIC)

The internet is quickly becoming many users preferred source of music, films and other forms of entertainment.

File-sharing sites can cause problems in three ways:

• The free-to-use ones are probably breaching copyright laws (either downloading or uploading is illegal).
• Some sites are used to distribute pornography, racist or other inappropriate or unlawful material, often masked as respectable content.
• These services also enable strangers to gain access to areas of your or your child’s computer, leaving it open to viruses, spyware and ‘botnet’ software.