While we wait for Cole to drop the latest news from West Virginia. Will Oremus mines an Intel survey for his new #Slatepitch:
… Interestingly, the group most optimistic about technology’s role in their lives is women older than 45 who live in developing countries. In China, seven out of 10 women over 45 believe people don’t use technology enough, and 79 percent say it makes us more human. That figure is 70 percent across all of the emerging-market countries in the survey, including Brazil, India, and Indonesia. But just 22 percent of American women in the same age group agreed.
Bell said she was astonished by the finding at first. But she suspects it stems from women in developing countries having seen technology dramatically improve their quality of life in the past decade or two. Specifically, women in developing countries said they believe technological innovations will improve education, transportation, work, and health care in the years to come. And they’re willing to help: 86 percent said they’d be willing to use software that watches their work habits, and 77 percent were open to the idea of using “smart toilets” to monitor their health.
In short, the Evgeny Morozov school of techno-skepticism seems to be catching on among young people in rich countries who take their gadgets for granted but fear for their privacy. But in countries where “quality of life” means access to basic education, health care, and sanitation, technology is still generally seen as an unalloyed good. To them, it seems, it’s privacy that’s the unnecessary luxury.
Lots of bullshit mining in such a short piece, but here’s my starter:
(1) Apart from the obvious alte kacker jokes, not a big surprise that an old lady would be willing to trade surveillance in return for the safe, indoor toilet facilities she doesn’t have now.
(2) Also not a big surprise that poor, undereducated elderly women will give the young, overenthusiastic young professionals whatever answers those kids are trolling for.
(3) Of course old women in small villages consider privacy a “luxury”; they know just how much that luxury, like most others, has been denied them all their lives. Anybody ever spent time in a community (even a virtual village, like say this blog) can attest that nobody ever forgets, and damn few neighbors forgive.
KG
I have an honest question… I’ve noticed that the GOP has hitched its wagon to the “the Obamacare website (and the state ones for that matter) aren’t safe” horse. Hewitt actually raised Snowden as a reason why the websites aren’t secure because anyone can just get it. So, my question – do these people not use the internet for anything else? I mean, I have to give cc numbers, addresses, phone numbers, email, and answer 17 security questions on a fairly regular basis. Is this all just “government bad, private sector good”?
rp
IOW, I don’t like the results of this survey, so I’m going to say it’s BS based on a bunch of bald assertions.
CarolDuhart2
As an over 50 woman, I can see what these women are feeling. One of the benefits of technology is connectivity-the ability to keep in touch, the knowledge you can get without gatekeepers, even some business opportunities over the net.
Especially the ability to get answers on your own. Pre-internet, many women had to rely on somewhat biased information, assuming they could get something at all.
Privacy is nice, but there’s no such thing as perfect privacy.
Gin & Tonic
@KG: To people for whom this is all a series of tubes, and who couldn’t spell SSL if you spotted them the S’s, they can say anything they feel like. They don’t understand anything, and their audience understands less than that.
gwangung
In other words, the oldsters know how illusory privacy is, so they re not concerned about having or not having it.
Kay
@efgoldman:
I really like Kevin Drum, but I think he’s wrong. Or someone is wrong. The LA Times got a totally different number than he did:
She does much better under Obamacare.
I guess Drum didn’t know her income so didn’t add the subsidy? The LA Times actually called her and got her income.
DH
I am confident that the women feel the way they do. Perhaps the best chapter in Robert Caro’s 1st volume of his biography of Lyndon Johnson is titled “The Sad Irons”. It tells of how without electricity women in his Congressional district had to work so hard that they ended up prematurely aged due to the back-breaking work. Johnson got them electricity-The Rural Electrification Act-and in gratitude the women started naming their children after him.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
Dinner: grilled sirloin, warm potato and asparagus salad, and a Dark & Stormy.
I feel better already.
Mnemo +1
Joseph Nobles
I found someone cussing Obamacare on the Facebook. They were losing their plan. And when they went on the website, the plan they found was going to be a lot more expensive. Now they were eligible for a subsidy that would have paid for the whole thing, but they weren’t going to accept that because they were good Christians and wouldn’t take a handout for nothing. And so isn’t Obamacare terrible?
If people are going to be that dumb about this, I’m glad they’re going to pay more for insurance.
Omnes Omnibus
Well, fuck. Given the choice between amoebic dysentery and wiretapping, I think most people would pick dysentery as the greater problem. But that isn’t the choice we face in the US nor is it the choice faced by others in the industrialized world. Our choices are privacy vs convenience in the private sector and privacy vs security in the public.
Kay
@Omnes Omnibus:
Doesn’t that sound like careful phrasing for something horrible? What does he mean, ‘watch their work habits’?
Anne Laurie
@Omnes Omnibus: Zactly. But, hey, “statistics”!
I mean, your nana may talk about the state of her bowels all the time, even at family meals, but try poking your head into the bathroom while she’s on the throne. (Watch out for the little wiry ones, they punch like a mule kicks.)
KG
@Kay: Hewitt had the guy from the Times on, and the women that the article is about. Hewitt sounded desperate, seizing on any little thing to discredit the writer. Really interesting, because the woman admitted that she hadn’t been on the California Covered website and thus didn’t know what the costs would be. And as I said above, Hewitt jumped on the “well its not secured because SNOWDEN!” thing.
Omnes Omnibus
@Kay: It could be something like analyzing the crop harvesting process determining a new way of doing it that saves time and labor (good) or monitoring your internet usage a work to ensure that you don’t visit overstock.com outside of your designated beaks (bad). My guess is that the people from poorer countries are more likely to be offer the first option and thus be receptive to it. At the same time, in the industrialized world, the second variety is prevalent. The whole thing is comparing apples to Indy cars.
Spaghetti Lee
@Anne Laurie:
Your nana sounds different than mine.
Spaghetti Lee
I suppose I’m a Morozovite. I made the mistake of reading about the idea of the technological singularity earlier today, which scares me the way some people are scared by clowns. It usually takes a solid 24 hours to get out of we’re-all-doomed mode.
pseudonymous in nc
There are two communications tech questions that matter for the next decade: the relationship between it and the state, and its impact on the last 2.5 billion people who will get it. I think the latter is even more important than the former. Both of those are way more interesting to me than the impact of the latest shiny gadget that does mostly the same as last month’s shiny gadget, just with a bigger screen and longer battery life.
@KG:
If the GOP wants to ride the data protection horse, and severely piss off its corporate backers, then let them ride. FFS, the entire wingnut welfare show is built upon selling and sharing other people’s personal data without any care for security or privacy. How do Spew Spewitt’s listeners imagine they end up getting a dozen pieces of wingnut junk mail every day?
Omnes Omnibus
@Spaghetti Lee: I make no excuses. Clowns are creepy.
Kay
@KG:
You have to believe it’s deliberate disinformation. I would think CNBC has a huge staff. They interviewed her and just never reached the question of what the replacement plan would cost? What on earth could they have been talking about other than that?
Omnes Omnibus
@Kay: The level of desperation on display is actually rather heartening to me.
Suffern ACE
@Kay: If they’d have phrased it as “Would you mind if your employer monitored you to make sure you aren’t a lazy thief”, they might have recieved a very different answer.
Kay
@Omnes Omnibus:
She was begging them! Still, they would not tell her.
Thank God for that one LA Times reporter. This poor woman would still be wandering the sets of cable shows, looking for affordable health insurance.
Suffern ACE
@Kay: The whole thing is quickly becoming “Neener. Neener. Gotcha, Mr. President.”
JoyfulA
@Kay: Some of the ways you can bid for contracts and work online install software that logs everything you do. The “clients” don’t want to pay much, and then they want to make sure you’re sitting there at the keyboard and working away every single minute.
In the depths of 2008-2009, I explored a couple of these. The whole setup gave me the creeps; I’m accustomed to being offered a job to do at a given price, accepting the job, and being responsible for getting the work done right and on time.
Fortunately, my old clients revived after several months, and I didn’t have to resort to the bidding sites.
Anyway, that’s one way of being technologically watched every second. Some people don’t mind. Or maybe don’t know otherwise.
Kay
@Suffern ACE:
I love the tone of the piece, too. “And you wouldn’t mind it either if you weren’t so SPOILED”
Geoduck
@Kay:
Even that might be an overly-generous assumption.
Omnes Omnibus
@Kay: Has Maslow been discredited? Because, if not, that theory pretty much covers what’s going on.
Kay
@JoyfulA:
I could never do it now, because I’ve been working by myself for so long, and this:
is how I work, except with very motivating and inflexible court-imposed deadlines.
Ruckus
@Geoduck:
Huge does not imply good.
Ramiah Ariya
Ergo, people in developed countries love to be spied by the NSA! “Spying agencies spy”, “Big surprise”, “What did people think?” and so on…
waspuppet
@gwangung: In other words, they already don’t have privacy from people who they look in the eye every day. A lack of electronic privacy from people they don’t see is too theoretical for them to worry much about.
RSA
@Omnes Omnibus:
I think this is probably right. Googling, I find that more than half of India’s employment is in agriculture, for example. I’d guess that in developing countries, physical privacy would be much more of an issue than computer privacy, and that more basic needs trump privacy concerns.