Search (1 results, page 1 of 1)

0.0021819547 = product of:
  0.013091727 = sum of:
    0.013091727 = weight(_text_:internet in 3273) [ClassicSimilarity], result of:
      0.013091727 = score(doc=3273,freq=4.0), product of:
        0.11352337 = queryWeight, product of:
          2.9522398 = idf(docFreq=6276, maxDocs=44218)
          0.038453303 = queryNorm
        0.11532187 = fieldWeight in 3273, product of:
          2.0 = tf(freq=4.0), with freq of:
            4.0 = termFreq=4.0
          2.9522398 = idf(docFreq=6276, maxDocs=44218)
          0.01953125 = fieldNorm(doc=3273)
  0.16666667 = coord(1/6)

Content

This in turn will accelerate the already widening economic inequality around the world. The internet and the platforms which it makes possible allow very small groups of individuals to make enormous profits while employing very few people. This is inevitable, it is progress, but it is also socially destructive. We need to put this alongside the financial crash, which brought home to people that a very few individuals working in the financial sector can accrue huge rewards and that the rest of us underwrite that success and pick up the bill when their greed leads us astray. So taken together we are living in a world of widening, not diminishing, financial inequality, in which many people can see not just their standard of living, but their ability to earn a living at all, disappearing. It is no wonder then that they are searching for a new deal, which Trump and Brexit might have appeared to represent. It is also the case that another unintended consequence of the global spread of the internet and social media is that the stark nature of these inequalities are far more apparent than they have been in the past. For me, the ability to use technology to communicate has been a liberating and positive experience. Without it, I would not have been able to continue working these many years past. But it also means that the lives of the richest people in the most prosperous parts of the world are agonisingly visible to anyone, however poor and who has access to a phone. And since there are now more people with a telephone than access to clean water in Sub-Saharan Africa, this will shortly mean nearly everyone on our increasingly crowded planet will not be able to escape the inequality.