THIS PAST MONTH the Good Information Project has been looking at whether Ireland and the EU are ready for the digital age.
With the internet currently in one of its big states of flux, the goal of this cycle was to look at where things are at right now and where they might be going, as well as the challenges and opportunities that come with the new digital age.
The new internet age is coinciding with the European Union’s digital decade which will see Ireland and other members states push for the digitisation of everything from education to business, from public services to the skills of workers across all sectors by 2030.
Starting out, we wanted to gauge the Irish public’s opinion of the digital transition, and whether they trust companies and State bodies with the technology available to them.
Polling carried out by Ireland Thinks/The Good Information Project found that younger age cohorts – 18-34 (34%) and 25-34 (30%) – are the least likely to trust State bodies and companies to use facial recognition technology responsibly, compared to those aged 55-64 (56%) and those aged over 65 (62%).
Some 49% of people overall said they would trust An Garda Síochána to responsibly use facial recognition tools, while 39% would trust government departments to use the technology, which is already being used by government and law enforcement agencies across the world, in a responsible way.
The poll also asked respondents whether they favoured verification of identity on social media. While 72% overall were in favour, again there was an age gap. 86% of those aged 65+ agree with identity verification, this figure declines with each age group down to 45% of 18-24-year-olds.
When asked about smartphone use, the poll found younger people in the 18-24 age group were more likely to say they spent too much or far too much time on their devices. This same age group is also the most likely to continue with some of the digital activities they took part in during the pandemic, such as video calls for work meetings, online grocery shopping and group video calls with friends.
Given our attachment to our smartphones, Stanford professor Anna Lembke’s description of them as “the modern-day hypodermic needle” shouldn’t come as a surprise. Catherine Healy looked at what is being constantly online doing to our brains and found our digital habits do often border on the obsessive even if experts disagree about whether internet use can be considered an addiction.
Catherine spoke with Colman Noctor, a child and adolescent psychotherapist, who stressed that the internet provides a space for friendship and connection but it’s no substitute for the lessons of real-life interaction.
So what can we do about it? London-based Irish psychotherapist Hilda Burke told The Good Information Project that there are plenty of simple ways to resist compulsive phone checking. One tactic suggested is “wait training” which involves gradually increasing the amount of time spent away from digital devices.
Big Tech
We know that questions about rights and regulations online have long been around, and mostly remain unresolved. Recent issues plaguing the sector is on what tech companies should be allowed to do, or how governments should enforce the rules that do exist.
In Ireland, a bill currently being considered by the Oireachtas would put regulation of social media, broadcast media and online communication under one combined body, the Media Commission. The legislation would give the watchdog broadly-phrased rules and sweeping powers of enforcement, but critics have said the proposal is a blunt instrument which treats social networks like traditional communication methods or broadcast media, when in reality it’s not quite comparable to either.
What will have bigger implications for big tech is what’s happening at an EU level. For the first time in twenty years, Europe is trying to regulate the secotr. Two major new EU laws should pass in the next few months, if not weeks: the Digital Markets Act and Digital Services Act.
CJ McKinney examined the new laws that look set to change a lot about our digital lives, and set out the four main things that the laws aim to do:
At a time when the EU is trying to reign in social platforms, big tech is making huge investments in developing metaverse-related tech and systems. Metaverse proponents imagine that browsing the internet of the future will not happen through browsers and apps, but via VR headsets and haptic gloves. Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg himself admitted during the company’s recent quarterly report that “this fully realised vision is still a ways off”.
Jack Kennedy set out to answer whether the metaverse the internet of the future, and found that we shouldn’t believe the hype just yet. Experts who spoke with Jack essentially advise us to proceed with caution it could be “another space that will give them the ability to monetise people’s data”.
Supporting the digital transition will mean more data centres in the near future, the problem is that these facilities need a huge amount of energy – as much as a large town in some cases. Given the carbon footprint of the 70 data centres currently around Ireland, experts who spoke with Catherine Healy question whether we can do without any more pressure on our grid until we have the copious renewable electricity supplies that we need.
Our Open Newsroom webinar saw Deirdre Clune MEP and Sara Riso, research manager at Eurofound, join Journal Media managing editor Susan Daly and The Journal business reporter Ian Curran, for a discussion on how Ireland and the EU can ensure that nobody is left behind by the latest developments in tech.
This work is co-funded by Journal Media and a grant programme from the European Parliament. Any opinions or conclusions expressed in this work is the author’s own. The European Parliament has no involvement in nor responsibility for the editorial content published by the project. For more information, see here.
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