Critical Readings 2017

So I have been putting off writing a review for this chapter, purely because, if I'm honest, I didn't really get it. I'm not economically minded, economic and finances normally go way over my head in every day life. Once I sat down with my tutor and we discussed what we all thought about this chapter, it started to make some logical sense, but even then, I'm still no expert at what capitalistic or non-capitalistic approaches are. I believe not one member of our group was overly keen on this reading. Once the topic was brought up with our tutor, however, it started to make a bit of sense, maybe because he was explaining it in an easier way than this book seems to do. Coming from someone like me who isn't familiar and tends to avoid any governmental or economic talk, its not the easiest of reads. Constant numbers and facts went straight over my head, but when explained in a simpler and more educational way and when explained with regards to every day life I got the...

Before reading this article, I had never thought of Facebook as anything more than a social media hub for photo sharing and messaging with friends and family. But if your eyes are opened in a different perspective by somebody like John Lanchester, you can see what has been happening in front of our eyes from the day your social media account was created. Once you take in the fact that Facebook to all of us is free, we never think of how a company like that becomes so wealthy. Lanchester explains that we are constantly being sold from under our keyboards. We are being sold to various advertisements and Facebook had created algorithms to 'work out' each individual person, or 'product' in their eyes and these algorithm use our information it is has gathered from 'search engines' or 'likes' to manipulate and mislead us to articles they know we will want to open. They seem to know more about us than our own government; which is terrifying to say the least. ...