Social Influence and the Normalization of Surveillance Capitalism: Legislation for the Next Generation

Abstract

Human personalities, characters, and habits are socially instructed and learned, traditionally from others, but also with others <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref1" xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">[1]</xref> . Either way, social influence plays a fundamental role in human development <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref2" xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">[2]</xref> , affecting individuals at any age and from any background <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref3" xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">[3]</xref> . According to Piaget’s stages of cognitive development, in the preoperational stage, the primary sources of such influence are parents, teachers, and siblings, and in subsequent stages, both peers and socially constructed knowledge gatekeepers (i.e., schools and newspapers) become increasingly important. In the preoperational stage, infants demonstrate animism, that is, they tend to assign life and feeling to nonliving things. Consequently, they can believe that “The Internet” is a real person and, being equally unable to differentiate between advertising and other media content, believe what “it” is telling them.