Techlash

Hello everyone!

Today I am going to talk about one of the ‘’hot topic” of the moment: Techlash

The end of my second year at the University of Greenwich is approaching and by more or less two months I realized that tech PR is the right field for me.

How did I draw that conclusion? Well, a combination of things I guess, both ‘good and bad’ aspects of tech that made me interested in working in this sector to help companies deal with current threats and see the limits of tech in communications.

First of all, I really do believe that technology empowers people: from Siri and self-driving cars to VR technologies and time travelling tools like FaceTime and Skype, which allow you to be anywhere without stepping a foot out of your own houses, tech has definitely improved our lives for the better.

Being one of the fastest-growing industry, it is no doubt true that in ten years’ time we’ll be doing things we can’t even think of right now. Let’s just consider how not even nine years ago there was no such thing as social media: no Instagram stories to show how cool your life is and no WhatsApp group chats to mute to stop your iPhone from ringing every two seconds – and no asking the group members for a summary when you can’t be bothered reading all the texts by the way.

I don’t think people of my age are 100% aware of how tech has massively made our life easier.

However, there’s always the other side of the coin, isn’t it? As quick as it made our life easier, from a couple of years tech has shown us its dark side: techlash.

Techlash is the word used to summarise the disillusionment society has toward tech in general.

The excitement coming from Steve Job’s first iPhone launch back in 2011 and Facebook’s motto “Move fast and break things” – with Obama’s $500 million social media campaign – left room for rising concerns around privacy protection and elections security failures caused by Silicon Valley tech titans Google, Facebook and Amazon.

Facebook-Cambridge Analytical data breach scandal, Google’s record £3.8bn fine for illegally making Android manufacturer pre-install Google search app to defend its dominance in search and Facebook-Youtube-Twitter failure in protecting users’ data from the Russians’ political purposes are just some of the examples of what’s going on at the moment.

So my question is: will the power of EU and its antitrust regulation be successful in protecting users? Technology is the future and there’s no going back to when it was not part of humans’ life, but will people regain trust in tech?

This would be a very interest topic to read in 2020 Edelman Trust Barometer.

#technology #techgiants #facebook #amazon #google #techlash #antitrust