Tag: information technology

Physically separated, socially connected

Computers and Society3 Comments

Contributed by Ron Baecker, an Emeritus Professor of Computer Science at the University of Toronto, co-author of The COVID-19 Solutions Guide and author of Computers and Society: Modern Perspectives (OUP, 2019).

My family is widely separated. I live in Canada. My brother-in-law, niece, nephew, and their families are in New Jersey and Pennsylvania; my cousins, their children, and their families are in Argentina, Spain, England, and on both coasts of the USA. Typically, I visit my niece and nephew once or twice a year; I manage a trip to Buenos Aires or Bilbao, Spain, about every 3 years. But not recently. I therefore Facetime with either my nephew or my niece almost every week. We also are about to have our fourth global family Zoom. This started out to celebrate individual birthdays, with great spirit and feeling of bringing the family closer together. The next event will celebrate 3 birthdays — ages 78, 41, and 9 — and a recent birth in the family in London. The 9-year-old birthday event will see us participating in a day-long scavenger hunt. What fun!

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Power, politics, and the internet

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Contributed by Uma Kalkar. Uma is a senior undergraduate at the University of Toronto and 2019-2020 International Presidential Fellow at the Center for the Study of the Presidency and Congress researching the politics of domestic and national digital divides.

In 2016, the United Nations classified internet access as a human right, deeming that cutting or censoring the internet by states impinges on personal freedoms. Unfortunately, conflict-heavy zones and politically unstable states deny their citizens unfiltered internet in order to isolate and control discussion and debate. Through internet censorship, governments attempt to hide regime atrocities and to revise history.

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