ParaSummary Question 6 - CAT 2022

Passage: Today, many of the debates about behavioural control in the age of big data echo Cold War-era anxieties about brainwashing, insidious manipulation and repression in the ‘technological society’. In his book Psychopolitics, Han warns of the sophisticated use of targeted online content, enabling ‘influence to take place on a pre-reflexive level’. On our current trajectory, “freedom will prove to have been merely an interlude.” The fear is that the digital age has not liberated us but exposed us, by offering up our private lives to machine-learning algorithms that can process masses of personal and behavioural data. In a world of influencers and digital entrepreneurs, it’s not easy to imagine the resurgence of a culture engendered through disconnect and disaffiliation, but concerns over the threat of online targeting, polarisation and big data have inspired recent polemics about the need to rediscover solitude and disconnect.

A) Rather than freeing us, digital technology is enslaving us by collecting personal information and influencing our online behaviour.

B) With big data making personal information freely available, the debate on the nature of freedom and the need for privacy has resurfaced.

C) The role of technology in influencing public behaviour is reminiscent of the manner in which behaviour was manipulated during the Cold War.

D) The notion of freedom and privacy is at stake in a world where artificial intelligence is capable of influencing behaviour through data gathered online.