With a mission to maintain an International educational standard and to broaden the horizons of its students, the Communications and Media Faculty of the Eastern Mediterranean University holds seminars that seek to enlighten the minds of its staff and student about our fast-growing digital media saturated world.
The Faculty hosted an eye-opening seminar on the 1st of December 2017 at the Faculty’s facility. The event which began at 13:30 was privileged to have James Bridle as the guest speaker of the seminar. James Bridle is a British writer, publisher, artist, and technologists based in Athens. His work covers the intersection of literature, culture and the network, as a journalist and essayist, he has many publications to his name and has based his work majorly on finding ways to open emancipatory possibilities despite the new challenges to mobility and justice.
In the seminar, he spoke about his on-going research on how technology affects daily life, citizenship and border-ship, he said technology makes it incredibly clear the way things are operated, and it can also be used to figure out how information is structured and controlled. Using Wikipedia as an example, he explained how the content of Wikipedia can be edited and re-edited by individuals by a simple click of the edit button on the Wiki website, this shows that technology has over the years changed the way information is structured. He gave more examples from his past research and publications about the way technology structures information over a period.
The government has opted to use technology to their advantage, and it helps them use the legality of citizenship to determine who has what rights. They have used technology to build websites that draw them closer to the people therefore, they now have total surveillance of their countries and citizens. Showing a diagram from his research he showed how the internet is interconnected between countries causing questions to be raised about the privacy of people in the world.
Speaking about the Internet, he said, “I believe the internet is a good thing because it makes cross-cultural relations possible, however, in the relationship between nationality, citizenship and the internet, I see citizenship been used as a weapon to deny people of their rights and technology (the internet) makes this possible, it reveals innate desires. It is impossible to ignore the vastness and the relationship between nationalism, the internet and the media”.
In conclusion, he said, “No one set out to build the internet into what it is today, it has sort of emerged into its present state over a period”.
By Jemimah Atii
