Privacy Rights and Media Research Paper

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1984 to Now: Fiction Becoming Reality?

In the 2016 film Snowden by Oliver Stone, illegal governmental surveillance of the lives of private citizens via digital means (such as ordinary computer webcams) disturbs the film's hero, a dramatized representation of real-life whistleblower Edward Snowden. Snowden ultimately rebels against the government agency that employs him as he rejects the totalitarian principles that govern the agency. Indeed, the film touches upon a reality that has troubled not just Snowden but many people. The reality has been described by Paul Rae as the combination of "massive infrastructure, lightly regulated intelligence behemoths, and large corporations seeking to realize value by consolidating mind-boggling amounts of information to identify patterns of behavior" (335). Collecting "big data" is the goal of these entities -- and Orwell foresaw it all more than half a century ago when he wrote 1984: he even put a face and a name to the big data rich Establishment -- Big Brother. Today, Big Brother is applied by the common public with such casualness that the controversial aspect of surveillance and the violation of privacy laws barely registers -- or so it seemed until November 8, 2016.

With the recent election of political outsider Donald J. Trump to the Office of the President of the United States, the anger of the public regarding governmental and corporate overreach and corruption may have reached a tipping point. If Trump and the movement he represents can be taken as an indicator of something disturbing happening in society, the question this research paper aims to answer locates at least of portion of this disturbance within the specific field of media law. The question is this: Are loopholes in media laws and increasing media consolidation transforming our society into an Orwellian dystopia? The answer to this question could help to explain what we are witnessing today in our own socio-political realm. Trump has vowed to crush Big Media consolidation (the most recent proposal being the AT&T-Time-Warner merger) because such mergers are viewed as a "threat to freedom" (Yousaf, Rahman 23). The hypothesis this paper puts forward is that the U.S. is indeed making Orwell's novel 1984 more realistic than he could have ever predicted: loopholes in media laws, increased consolidation, infringement on privacy rights, and heightened sensitivity within the nation is taking freedom away from citizens and giving ultimate power to the government, as though the nation truly were dystopian.

Methodology

To answer the question, a content analysis is performed of contracts from Xbox, Sony, Apple, Dell, and Facebook, along with secondary research examination of similarities between the novel 1984 and modern society, statistics of declining literacy rates, increased surveillance cases, surveillance usage via X-Box Kinect/Computer Webcams, slang-shortened terms being added to dictionary over the last decade, etc. from articles, journals, online databases, and editorials from electronic newspapers.

For the purposes of this paper, dystopia is defined as citizens turning a blind eye to government corruption, thinking they still possess all of their freedoms and constitutional rights, when in reality, they do not.

Journals and articles were searched using Google Scholar. Keywords included: "surveillance state," "slang dictionary," "literacy rates," "new media mergers," and "illegal surveillance." Contracts of the major media corporations were searched by including the name of the company with "user contract.

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Findings

The typical contractual clause for usage of the products of the major corporations (Xbox, Sony, Apple, Dell and Facebook) is as follows: "[the service/product] is offered to you conditioned on your acceptance without modification of the terms, conditions, and notices contained herein. Your use of the [service/product] constitutes your agreement to all such terms, conditions, and notices. The [service/product] may also contain additional terms that govern particular features or offers" ("Xbox.com Terms of Use"). A statement on privacy and personal information collected then follows, with clauses explaining that "cookies" are used to collect browsing history data, data from third parties, and user reports -- and that the data is shared with third parties. The user may object to the contractual obligations and refuse to give up his or her privacy rights claims -- but doing so will prevent the user from enjoying the product/service offered by the company. Contingent upon using services and products by these new media producers is the giving up of privacy rights claims.

Loopholes in media law allow corporations to gather data on users within the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) regulations specifically in spite of the FTC's position as the "most influential regulating force on information privacy in the United States" (Solov, Hartzog 583). These loopholes are taken advantage of by corporations that sell gather and sell big data to other corporations seeking to gain an advantage on consumer information in the digital age of marketing. New media has essentially created a new arena in which information on user history, practices, and profiles is as valuable as gold. That regulatory bodies like the FTC should allow corporations to handcuff users regarding their privacy rights by essentially compelling them to agree to terms of usage or forfeit their right to use, suggests that the regulatory bodies facilitate the aims of the corporations while putting on a guise of regulation for the public. The existence of lobbying groups, which put pressure on legislators and regulators and which help to finance the political careers of many, further indicates the Fascistic nature of modern government in the U.S., as Phillips-Fein observes in "The Business Lobby and the Tea Party." The mere existence of political groups like the Tea Party or the body of voters that elected Donald Trump into office signifies that there is a social reaction to the overreach and corruption of media entities exploiting consumer demands for private gain in violation of privacy rights. This social reaction, moreover, indicates that a dystopian society is in place but that a movement among disenfranchised citizens is apparently underway to redress these concerns.

At the same time, literacy rates in the U.S. are abysmal when compared to the rest of the world. As The New Yorker reported, the United States scored "second to last" in "literacy among sixteen-to-twenty-four-year-olds" according to the OECD's Survey of Adult Skills from participating countries around the world (Cassidy). A decline in educational standards is in keeping with dystopian narrative projected by Orwell: the proles of his novel are an uneducated class that clings to its simple pleasures and is not capable of organizing in order to threaten….....

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