How the information technologies are changing our reality

By Dr Fernando Huamán Flores

University of Piura

Since Peru connected to the Internet ffor the first time in 1994 [1], many things have changed. We live in a social-media-embeded society, the audiences are informed and take decisions from the mobile telephone [2],  the organizations begin to dialogue in a horizontal way with the citizens, TV-viewers leave the traditional media and choose streaming platforms, deciding how and when to entertain, the politicians are not responsing only to the big media yet, but they face a digital public opinion that asks them from a comfortable home.

So, the technology goes transforming our vital and usual spaces, and it is configuring a new society that, progressively and slowly, understands the things are not like before yet.

The penetration of Internet in Peru is a sustained phenomenom, that according to GFK (2019), stands 56% nationwide, in rural and urban places. Although there is still an important percentage of Peruvians who do their lives offline, the trends point us out that the digital transformation processes have no reverse and, unavoidabily, they will end to reach the majority of the population.

This is highlighted, for example, by the Technical Report On Information and Communication Technologies at Homes (INEI, 2019, page 9), which evidences that during the first trimester of 2019, 64.4% of 12-to-18-year-old teenagers use Internet across the nation [3].

This digital advance is more than a technological vogue. It is generating new parameters on social interaction processes. People leave the traditional writing for shipping in newly ways of audiovisual expression, friends don’t meet only in the primary and secondary reference groups yet, but digital platforms those break geographical and cultural boundaries.

The public space is not configured upon the relationship between traditional media and the set up by the common discurssive universe anymore, but multiple spaces have a public, alternative place, those may be opposite to the mediatic establishment. Thus, the physical space, the territory, has left to be –for actual generations- the necessary condition to explain the community configuration. Internet has created a new relation between the notions of public life and private life. If the public was the environment of the subjectivity that had communitarian interest before, such as the political opinions, the consumption preferences, or the position about the dominant consensus, they are also public today. Private contexts such as the birthday celebrations, the family trips, clothes purchasing, and even the pain about a disease.

So, the social media show us expressive ways, modestyless, where the public –powered by the technology- is that wished to show. It is about a speech universe influenced by a savage liberalism, where the references of privacy unframe and the unlimited exposition affects to build the own identity.

That is why this digital transformation process wonders scholars and experts, who begin to concern about the dangers for a society surfing on the Internet ignoring its social dynamics. For example, there are studies highlighting the compulsive use of Internet in the youngers, who leave to pay attention to their offline world’s duties (Yarlequé, L.; Javier, L.; Núñez, E.; Navarro, L.; and Matalinares, M., 2013).  Other researches emphasize the consumption of forbidden contents, the connection to strangers, the technological dependence, and the threats to the privacy  (Morales, 2015).

The net enters unsynchronically in children and teenagers because there is no limit of space and time. The challenge consists in forming people who are not servile to the digital traffic monetization. If it is not cared, the individual prones to a ficticious identity, amazed by the trends, and engaged by the indeterminacy.

Among the most common risks of the digitalized society are cyberbullying, grooming [4], and sexting [5]. “In the first one, the consequences come from emotional, academic, and behavioral  problems to low self-esteem, depression, and even suicide and homicide attempts.” (Astorga-Aguilar and Schmidt-Fonseca, 2019, page 9) Regarding grooming and sexting, the danger appears facing the need to acceptance. The victim assumes the few modest protocols  of the net and grasps to a false emotionality. This becomes more concerning when the parents are not prepared to manage the net’s perils. In the physical space, it is possible to choose closing the door. On the Internet, the door is ever open.

In this context, the social acceptance is configured from the received likes, the recreation of memes, and the participation in the dominant hashtags (#). But those new pertainty indicators are achieved in a liquid context, as much as the conversation axises turn anarchist – eberybody can speak, few listen to, and the topic is changed in the end.

But the social dynamics of the Internet is not bad itself. It is about a cultural transformation moment caused by the technology, that demands a lot of attention from who intervene in the formation of citizens. The solution consists not only on knowing how the apps work but understanding the digital socialization processes, their relation to the personal identity, and the cognitive and expressive opportunities of a new alphabet living with us, already.

Internet has created new communication manners and its social impact can be analogically understood as the arrival of movies or the TV. In the 1980s, Proffessor Stuart Hall, theoricist  of cultural studies, manifested that the media, when are living with the society, generate a shared semiotics –a new language- that is naturalized in the life of the people (Hall, 1980). In other words, when a new media platform breaks out, a new content is not only accessible, but new forms of interpretation are acquired throught the codes of the new mean.

An example can frame this issue. As a kind of joke, it is toldthat during the first movies screening in 1895, there were people running out away because they saw a train came them over. Although this was ever discussed about the story’s accuracy, it is not freaky to think about who are not accostumed to the motion language to react so. Today, we are accostumed to that language and nobody may run out away if a train comes over. Something similar happens with the Internet – the society is accostumming to the digital language and new expressive manners appear.

Today, for example, a teenager would not be motivated to read a 4-page story about a historic event, but may consume this same information on an interactive format. This new narrative manner would allow him to go inside the past with audio and video, the chance to choose information from his point of view, and even to assume an active role if the story has gaming elements.

That is why the recordings with 360-degree cameras, the information with video-game narrative, or the comic-formatted news are not futuristic trends. Currently, the media are addressing time and resources to innovation laboratories. The new manners to connect with the audiences are already living with us, and more than one stakeholder wants to learn the new language. As the Proffessor Villanueva-Mansilla affirms (2017), the technology has cultural effects those are becoming real in new narrative manners and changes in contents generation and consumption.

That is why the digital scenario manifests dangers but it also encourages – it will be necessary to see the digital ecosystem like a public square, where we will attend knowing its risks, caring our identity and integrity, being aware it is like the street itself. So, the education in cybersecurity and the learning of the new narratives are two aspects those today become highly necessary.

In that sense, the study The digitalbehavior of Piura students that we present from the Center of Research on Public Opinion (CIOP in Spanish) of University of Piura’s School of Communications, pretends something else than a descriptive approach to how the teenagers interact in the digital society. We hope the results to be a starting point for the reflection of parents and teachers with two specific tasks. First of all, to kno the status quo of the students’ digital behavior emphasizing to research how they use the social media and to know what actions they take facing risky situations. Second, to warn about the need to an adequate digital alphabetization.

If the formative processes introduce digital alphabetization processes, then the risks could begin to mitigate, and the new language may be seen as a possibility to social dialogue. In Peru, there are innovative cases which the new narratives are serving the community. For example, in 2013, a group of Nauta, Loreto-native children recorded the video-clip Kumbarikira, a Kukama-and-Spanish-language rap that viralized on the social media and impacted the big media [play and watch above this paragraph]. The task of this initiative was preserving  the language of the Kukama-Kukamira people, at the Peruvian Amazon Basin. Before the video viralization, the teenagers were ashamed to speak their native language. It changed because the new manner to tell –to narrate- their identity (Aularia, 2018).

So, the present study pretends not to be alarmist but, in the opposite, this is responsibility of parents and teachers to know how the platforms are working as well as to learn the encoding and the decoding of the new expressive manners (Astorga-Aguilar; Schmidt-Fonseca, 2019). All this must be put together a preventive training, explaining that the digital society is the society itself.

Somehow, we must teach-and learn- the basics again in the online context – to lock the door, to invite home only the friends and related, and to ask for help if somebody vulnerates our image, honor, and integrity.

[1] The Peruvian Scientific Network (RCP in Spanish) was the organization that installed the first public Internet café in Peru. It had 40 computers and was located in the Ricardo Palma Cultural Center, Lima City. It pretended any person accessed the digital tools without any kind of restriction. The top used service was the e-mail, mainly demanded by people from the academic world. Furtherly, its use extended to the business field and the society in general. However, the Internet cafés popularized since 2000, making posible thousands of people to access the borning tools of digital ecosystem. Currently, RCP is the responsible organization to grant domains to the webs in Peru (Nishiyama, 2019).

[2] In the commercial sector, according to the study The e-commerce in Latin America(2019), 30% of retail sales are already made on the Internet, and 49% of digital users use to buy online.

[3] Also, 56.9% from the amount of men (6 years old and older) use Internet, while women are 51.1%(INEI, 2019, page9).

[4] The grooming is accessing the innocence and ingenuity of somebody throught fake profiles, looking for the trust and the friendship, normally via the social media. The purpose is controlling another person for abusing it. It starts from the friendship, that allows to get personal data, then the cheating comes on, generally attacking the feeling side (to be in love) to get photographs, and finally the blackmail for not releasing the gotten pictures (Astorga-Aguilar and Schmidt-Fonseca, 2019).

[5] The sexting is understood as “the practice consisting to share pictures of sexual, personal, or others’ kind, throught telephones or Internet.” (Arab and Díaz, 2015, page 10).