Reading Aarushi Bhandari’s interesting essay “Is there any hope for the Internet?” via The Conversation. The author is an assistant professor of sociology from Davidson College in Northern Carolina.
Bhandari argues: “As the Internet has become more integrated in our daily lives, few would describe it as a place of love, compassion and cooperation. Study after study describe how social media platforms promote alienation and disconnection – in part because many algorithms reward behaviours like trolling, cyberbullying and outrage.”
What gets me is my own thought process in the reading of this essay.
Initially, as thought-provoking and engaging as this essay is, I saw it as a clever way to promote the author’s book Attention and Alienation: The International Political Economy of Information and Communication Technologies (2025).
As I kept reading, I started thinking the author indeed has a point. As users and perhaps content creators ourselves, we DO invest our time, creativity and emotions on the Internet’s numerous platforms. And, whether we like it or not, we DO find our “experiences on online platforms gradually deteriorate as companies increasingly exploit users’ data and tweak their algorithms to maximise profits”.
“To me, a big problem in Internet culture is the way people’s humanity is obscured,” says the author. “People are free to speak their minds in text-based public discussion forums, but the words aren’t always attached to someone’s identity. Real people hide behind the anonymity of user names. It isn’t true human interaction.”
Agreed. But I was still naively optimistic. As users, we can choose to stay away from disinformation and harmful content by consuming information from credible and trusted content providers. As content creators, we can also do our bit to help building an online environment of care, compassion and cooperation.
The author concludes: “Raised eyebrows. Grins. Frowns. They’re what make humans distinct from increasingly sophisticated large language models and artificial intelligence chatbots like ChatGPT. After all, is anything you can’t say while looking at another human being in the eye worth saying the first place?” The last sentence is particularly awesome commonsense.
But, when I did check out Bhandari’s book, I felt embarrassed and even ashamed at my own prejudice… “Aarushi Bhandari offers a new way to understand the political economy of attention, combining quantitative analysis and personal narrative to critique the role of information and communications technologies in global society… Along the way, Bhandari shares her own journey as a chronically online millennial woman growing up among the Kathmandu elite in a dominant-caste Hindu family during the Nepali Civil War.”
So, throughout the reading, why did I simply (and “naturally”) assume the author is a man?
(Day 53 #WarmWinterRead #WWR25 via @librarieschangelives)
Voices under the Sun 陽光下的聲音 