首页 - 网校 - 万题库 - 美好明天 - 直播 - 导航
热点搜索
学员登录 | 用户名
密码
新学员
老学员
您现在的位置: 考试吧 > 考研 > 考研复习指导 > 考研英语复习指导 > 考研阅读 > 正文

2018考研英语二阅读Text 3 真题源文

来源:新东方 2017-12-23 18:11:39 要考试,上考试吧! 考研万题库
“2018考研英语二阅读Text 3 真题源文”考试吧考后发布,更多2018考研答案、2018考研真题等信息,请关注考试吧考研网或搜索公众微信号“万题库考研”!

2018考研真题及答案热点文章微信对答案万题库估分

扫描/长按下面二维码
获取考研真题及答案

扫描/长按下面二维码
下载考研万题库估分

  Digital media

  Opinion

  The Guardian view on digital giants: they farm us for the data

  Editorial

  We are neither the customers nor even the product of companies like Google, but we turn our lives into the knowledge that they sell

  An astonishing project is under way to build a “digital time machine” that will show us in fine detail the lives of ordinary Venetians across a thousand years of history. It is made possible by the persistence of the republic’s bureaucracy, which, when Napoleon extinguished the Republic of Venice in 1797, left behind 80km of shelving full of records of births, deaths, trades, building, land ownership, private letters, ambassadors’ reports and even medical information. All this is now to be digitised, cross-referenced, and analysed, and all its secrets laid bare to provide a picture in unprecedented richness and detail of the lives of individuals and the development of society over many centuries. Obviously, this is wonderful for historians and indeed anybody with an imagination alive today. One wonders, though, what the Venetians would have made of it, had they known their lives and letters would be so carefully anatomised after their deaths.

  Far more is known about us now, though, and in real time. The data in the Venetian archives was unmatched in medieval and even early modern Europe, but it is only legend and scraps of hearsay compared to the knowledge of us accumulated by the giants of the digital economy – Google, Facebook, and Amazon – who all in various ways use the data harvested from their users to make billions of dollars, from advertising or from direct selling, or from some combination of both. Their knowledge of our intimate lives doesn’t wait two centuries or more until we’re dead. They get it live, in real time. Sometimes they know our minds before we know them ourselves. It’s a situation quite unprecedented in history.

  The European commission may be about to levy the biggest fine in its history on Google for anti-competitive behaviour – potentially more than €1bn. This case, five years in the making, is the latest, and perhaps the largest, battle in the struggle to establish democratic control over the giants of the digital economy. In the US, the government has been captured by the corporations, and in China universal surveillance is openly converted to a means of government control. Only the EU attempts to balance these powers to the benefit of the ordinary citizen.

  The power and ambition of these companies is astonishing – Amazon has just announced the purchase of the upmarket grocery chain Whole Foods for $13.5bn, but two years ago Facebook paid even more than that to acquire the WhatsApp messaging service, which doesn’t have any physical product at all. What WhatsApp offered Facebook was an intricate and finely detailed tracery of its users’ friendships and social lives. Facebook promised the European commission then that it would not link phone numbers to Facebook identities, but it broke the promise almost as soon as the deal went through. Even without knowing what was in the messages, the knowledge of who sent them and to whom was enormously revealing and still could be. What political journalist, what party whip, would not want to know the makeup of the WhatsApp groups in which Theresa May’s enemies are currently plotting? It may be that the value to Amazon of Whole Foods is not so much the 460 shops it owns, or the distribution network, but the records of which customers have purchased what.

  Competition law appears to be the only way to address these imbalances of power. But it is clumsy. For one thing, it is very slow compared to the pace of change within the digital economy. By the time a problem has been addressed and remedied it may have vanished in the marketplace, to be replaced by new abuses of power. But there is a deeper conceptual problem, too. Competition law as presently interpreted deals with financial disadvantage to consumers and this is not obvious when the users of these services don’t pay for them. The users of their services are not their customers. That would be the people who buy advertising from them – and Facebook and Google operate a virtual duopoly in digital advertising to the detriment of all other media and entertainment companies.

  The product they’re selling is data, and we, the users, convert our lives to data for the benefit of the digital giants. Just as some ants farm aphids for the honeydew that oozes from them when they feed, so Google farms us for the data that our digital lives exude. Ants keep predatory insects away from where their aphids feed; Gmail keeps the spammers out of our inboxes. It doesn’t feel like a human or democratic relationship, even if both sides benefit.

  • This article was amended on 19 June 2017 to remove a reference to Apple which was not apt.

  https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jun/18/the-guardian-view-on-digital-giants-they-farm-us-for-the-data

扫描/长按二维码关注可获取考研答案
获取2018考研真题答案
获取2018考研分数线
获取2018考研调剂信息

考研万题库下载微信搜索"万题库考研"

  相关推荐

  2018年考研答案2018年考研真题考研万题库估分

  2018考研政治答案考研英语答案2018考研数学答案

  直播解析:2018考研真题答案解析关注考研微信对答案热点文章

  2018考研成绩查询时间微信查分提醒考研复试分数线

0
收藏该文章
看了本文的网友还看了
文章搜索
万题库小程序
万题库小程序
·章节视频 ·章节练习
·免费真题 ·模考试题
微信扫码,立即获取!
扫码免费使用
考研英语一
共计364课时
讲义已上传
53214人在学
考研英语二
共计30课时
讲义已上传
5495人在学
考研数学一
共计71课时
讲义已上传
5100人在学
考研数学二
共计46课时
讲义已上传
3684人在学
考研数学三
共计41课时
讲义已上传
4483人在学
推荐使用万题库APP学习
扫一扫,下载万题库
手机学习,复习效率提升50%!
版权声明:如果考研网所转载内容不慎侵犯了您的权益,请与我们联系800@exam8.com,我们将会及时处理。如转载本考研网内容,请注明出处。
官方
微信
扫描关注考研微信
领《大数据宝典》
下载
APP
下载万题库
领精选6套卷
万题库
微信小程序
帮助
中心
文章责编:Quchangwei