Members: Ting-Chun, Liu/Jennifer Yang/Yiying Wang Kiera/Hasin Anik
The Internet was first created in 1983 in the United States. Until recently the internet has always been controlled by rich heterosexual white males.
Social:
“Elon Musk Royal Society.jpg” by Duncan.Hull is licensed under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Elon_Musk_Royal_Society.jpg
- Lack of diversity was a cultural issue throughout the world and it is reflected in the Internet, mostly because only certain groups of people had access to academics and technology at that time. It was mostly rich white male, who had the wealth for going to higher institutions and able to access computers. It doesn’t represent the whole society which includes people of all kind.
- The emergence of new media has broken the monopoly of traditional media in freedom of expression, providing a freer and broader platform for the public to express their personal opinions on public affairs or in the public sphere than ever before.
- With the influx of information on the internet, most people have abandoned traditional media such as newspapers. Although there are many types of information and program content available, among the various group disconnected from each other, each group’s access is largely limited to a small part of this content.
Political:
- The kind of political messaging user like and engage with, including political figures they support and share, lead to the appearance of similar figures and messages online, leading to self-generated and algorithmically supported filter bubbles. Without equal exposure to different views, users end up thinking their view is supported by the rest of the population and develop more extreme and entrenched opinions on politics.
- Example: narratives about coronavirus
While governments and major media outlets are also struggling to cover and frame the outbreak, social media platforms have allowed authoritarian communication campaigns to widen and deepen the gap between citizens and the state at a time when these connections are most urgently needed to combat the international health crisis. A contrasting example is that some authoritarian states (such as China) imply that the virus originated in a laboratory in the US, while the US tries to spread the word that the virus originated in Wuhan, China. Both sides have suppressed the diversity of discourse on their social media platforms in order to attack each other.
Economic:
- Lacking of the diversity in economic will reflect the professional levels when producing the items in different countries, and the lack of the economic diversity is caused by geographical locations, and the mode of the consumption.
- Ex: in the middle east, oil and gas industry has emerged as the primary industry there, and it brought great wealth to the countries. However, some countries is not really good geography, so it causes the lack of economic diversity, making the economy declined.
