Week 5 — Walled Garden Theory

▶ DIGC202 GLOBAL NETWORKS

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The way the internet works will always change throughout the years, whether it would be through adaptation or improvement. iFeudalism is a term that can be used to describe one of the phenomenons that occurred to the internet in this day in age — it originated from the term used in medieval European history that is; ‘Feudalism’. According to Wikipedia, Feudalism is a system of land ownership and duties — every bit of the land belongs to and is controlled by the king/lord, however within the land; the lord can have vassals that reside on their land. But just like how I mentioned, the lord is the only one who controls all aspects of the land — that means that once you are committed to the system and are living on the land; you are to obey and follow the rules that the lord gives.

It sounds pretty familiar doesn’t it? Treat the mainframe of the internet as the lord and all of us that use the internet are the vassals. The difference about today’s generation is that instead of being on a manor/land we are all in a walled garden (Chen, Feamster, & Calandro, 2017) — it sounds pretty scary actually; what this means is that whenever we are on the internet going about our daily businesses, what we don’t realise is that the internet is constantly watching and listening to our every move (Nichols, 2018). Let me give you an example; I’m scrolling through my Facebook feed while talking to a friend (in person) about how I really want to buy new clothes. The next day I’ll be scrolling through my Facebook feed again and an ad that’s advertising about Zalora giving student discount if you use the code (blank) for (x)% off! I don’t know about you guys but this has happened to me multiple times and I still get the creeps every time it does happen.

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These signs of a walled garden can be seen on majority of social media platforms nowadays, especially the ones that most people use like Instagram and Facebook. Since this phenomenon is still happening and is getting more complex as the years go by, most of our information about our personal details are and can be floating on the internet because it’s easier and cheaper to store information than to erase it — which causes there to be multiple copies of copies of the original (Lessig, 2015).

References:

1. Chen, A., Feamster, N., & Calandro, E. (2017). Exploring the walled garden theory: An empirical framework to assess pricing effects on mobile data usage. Telecommunications Policy, 41(7-8), 587–599. doi: 10.1016/j.telpol.2017.07.002
2. Feudalism. (2019, November 9). Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feudalism.
3. Lessig, L. (2015). Free culture: how big media uses technology and the law to lock down culture and control creativity. Retrieved from http://www.authorama.com/free-culture-4.html
4. Nichols, S. (2018, June 4). Your Phone Is Listening and it’s Not Paranoia. Retrieved from https://www.vice.com/en_au/article/wjbzzy/your-phone-is-listening-and-its-not-paranoia.