Whenever a technology company including its employees or it products receive strong negative feedback or response then that is regarded as the techlash.
It has been found out that techlash is a growing hostility in large technology companies and is considered to be the opposition to modern technology, which is most importantly concerned about innovations centering the information technology(Thomas A. Hemphill 2019). Thus as more new technology emerges , the more it becomes difficult for the technology company to keep pace with the growing problem of techlash.
The most important concern that lie behind backlash are the ones related to the general public, while techlash reduces both individual and societal welfare, but not all concerns raised about technology and new innovations are frivolous or has disadvantages. The first public concern the lie behind the techlash are about the fact that the tech companies are destroying Consumer’s Privacy.
The second concern behind the techlash is how the Online Platforms exploit Consumers. A study conducted by Su and others (2021) shows that the data collective is exploitative not because it affects customer’s privacy but also customers do not receive adequate compensation for their own data which is considered to have a worth more than the goods and services in digital economy.
The development of Internet has been shaped by structural inequalities, in short the greater there is structural Inequality in the world the lesser the development of Internet takes place. The vast population of this world has always been an important factor in shaping the Internet, while contents like Wikipedia depend mostly on people’s contribution to the given article. The knowledge people possess also depend upon their amount of technology they are exposed to.
On the other hand Internet has always been a force where such inequality are removed(Baturay, 2020). Mostly the availability of most of the information available is available at a very less cost. The main reason why such technology is available to most of the people in the world because most of the people in the world uses the internet and pays for the technology. As a result these kind of technology has been always following a bi directional relationship. The more people uses Internet, the more it is available to all the sections of the society in lower cost. This inequality is mostly seen in the section where the social class division of the people is more, this allows people of the higher section of the society to use more of the available technology to gain access to Internet. Thus, though social class is the main factor in cases where people are deprived of the Internet, yet Internet on the other hand helps to bridge the Gap of such distinction.
The third concern revolves around the fact that most of the technology companies manipulate users through dark pattern(Abdulgalimov,2020). These dark patterns are described as digital design patterns that rely on psychology of consumers to trick them into performing certain action such as clicking or spending more time on a web page then they would.
Around the world the government is trying to stop techlash by simultaneously trying to limit the power of technology companies. While various nations has tried to change the data flows across the world and how the global Internet works. Some of the companies like Australia has passed the laws to force Google and Facebook pay the publishers for the news, Britain has created its own tech regulator to police the Industry. India has adopted new measures to have a control over the social media.Russia has controlled the way data flows in Twitter’s traffic and Both Cambodia and Myanmar has put a broad Internet Restrictions.
References
1.Thomas A.H,(2019).’Techlash’,responsible innovation, and the self regulatory orgnization, Journal of Responsible Innovation, 6:2, 240-247, DOI:10.1080/23299460.2019.1602817.
2.Makoto S, Lazar A,Irani L,(2021),Article No: 179pp 1-27 https://doi.org/10.1145/3449253.
Abdulgalinov D,Kirkham R,Nicholson J, Vlachokyriakos V,2020, Designing for Employee Voice. In Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’20). Association for Computing Machinery, Honolulu, HI, 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1145/3313831.3376284
M.H. Baturay and S. Toker, 2015. “An investigation of the impact of demographics on cyberloafing from an educational setting angle,” Computers in Human Behavior, volume 50, number 1, pp. 358–366.
doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2015.03.081, accessed 16 June 2020.
5.https://search.creativecommons.org/photos/109c2ef2-8f9c-443a-81b8-2ea6850266e3
6.https://search.creativecommons.org/photos/579944b3-2247-464f-ba7e-58d7316781da
7.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KC1VtefazDg&t=29s