Information Technology as an Aggregator of Fear

Ivan Sugiarto Widodo (13504149)

Information Technology (IT), by function, gives people a broad amount of Information through every means, such as Internet, Television and printed ones. Fear, said evolutionist, is a reaction to something that threatens a person survivals. Through it, things that Americans doesn’t know about life in Indonesia, for example, nowadays that information is served directly into American’s rooms, through Television, Internet, and other printed means. This has an advantage on the other hands, for example, people could get fresh issues about world’s politics, rumors, and economics. But, that information also gives us, although not explicitly, a glimpse views of world, either bad or good ones. On the other hands, man gets the bad ones faster than the good ones, according to Meme,
The Viruses of Mind. The information technology gives the necessary infrastructure for it.

To make it simple, I will give an analogy for frightening information spreads. Imagine that you live in a desolated island in middle of pacific, it has 10.000 inhabitants. Live there is very peaceful, murder, theft, robbery happens once a year. Your island is a part of a nation named Archipelago, which has 1.000.000 inhabitants and rather homogeny demography in every island, for example. Last year, an IT investor invested in the internet network in that nation and established a web-page called Archipelago News Network (ANN). The ANN has many journalists that search for news in every island that Archipelago has. Furthermore, Archipelago government gives an incentive for one-computer-one-home policy. At this point, let’s assume that the murder, theft, robbery happens in the same rate every island. Now, with the information technology, the information about these crimes aggregate into 100 times! Every three days, you see a murder, theft and robbery, you felt scared and live is not as beautiful as the old times.

According to that analogy, we can understand why today world is full of fear, hatred and pain. It is simply because of the advancement of IT and the growing number of people; today record earth inhabitants reach over 7 millions. World has became more complex. Information about famine in the Africa can spread though internet and television, this implies that most of people on earth shared the same fear of famine. Terrorists, uses IT to spread their terror, the world is scared. The other side of people reacts accordingly. The world is not a safe place again.