Conclusions

Abstract

There are people in the world who have got bored with the Digital Age. There are people who have rejected the Net altogether, being fearful of the way in which governments and corporations routinely monitor us and our personal data (McChesney, 2013; Petley, 2014). It is quite clear that both hegemons are colluding with one another to go beyond the boundaries of what most citizens would think is reasonable, invading our private leisure spaces and taking our private and personal information in the name of counter-terrorism or just profiteering. Quite rightly, people are choosing to reduce or eliminate their digital presence: in my own use of Facebook, for example, I have made a point about lying about my age, just to throw out any algorithms and person-matching that might be taking place. For governments, the rise of the Digital Age has frightened them with its utopian ethic and its piracy and its freedoms and its claims to be ushering in a new world of transparency and knowledge. They have responded, as we have seen, with fears about terrorism and extremism that give them what they claim to be a just cause to abandon centuries-long, hard-earned human rights. They routinely intercept digital data and routinely check it, finding loopholes and permissions in long-winded regulations and laws to breach the privacy of millions of Net users around the world (McChesney, 2013).