Concepts practice questions.

Safaricom launched M-Pesa in Kenya in 2007, letting people send money by text message years before most adults held a bank account or a smartphone. Which description of this change is most accurate?

• An existing network of bank branches was digitised so that the same transactions moved online
• A stage of infrastructure that other countries passed through was skipped
• The technology was adopted only after the banking system had been modernised
• The change was reversed once smartphones became common in the same market

Answer: A stage of infrastructure that other countries passed through was skipped

Kenya did not first build branch banking and then automate it; mobile transfer arrived in its place, so the sequence other markets followed was bypassed rather than repeated. Reading every change as the digitisation of an existing service is the habit this case is meant to break.

A commentator writes that the arrival of smartphones inevitably produced shorter attention spans in every society that adopted them. In Digital Society terms, the weakness of this reasoning is that it

• relies on a single study of one age group that has not been replicated elsewhere
• confuses a smartphone with the applications that run on it
• treats the device as sole cause and ignores how societies shape its use
• describes a change that happened too slowly to be measured reliably

Answer: treats the device as sole cause and ignores how societies shape its use

The argument is technologically determinist: it grants the artefact a single inevitable effect and leaves out schooling, regulation, work patterns and household norms, which is why the same device produces different outcomes in different places. The flaw is in the causal structure, not in any one study.

Kodak's engineers built a working digital camera prototype in 1975, and the company filed for bankruptcy protection in January 2012. Which reading of this case fits the concept of change?

• Digital photography was invented outside the company and taken up far too quickly for anyone to follow
• The change was purely technical and the firm's business model was not involved
• Photography ceased to be a mass activity once film manufacturing declined
• A firm can hold the new technology and still be displaced by what it does to its market

Answer: A firm can hold the new technology and still be displaced by what it does to its market

Possessing the invention was never the problem; the revenue that paid for the company came from film and processing, and the new technology removed both. Change in this course is analysed at the level of markets, institutions and incentives, not only of devices.

A council closes the telephone line for housing repairs and keeps only a web form. Using Source C, which statement best describes what has changed for tenants aged 75 and over?

• The service was withdrawn from the group by an explicit council decision
• The service still exists, but reaching it now assumes a device and a skill
• The group's need for repairs fell at the same time as the line closed
• The web form takes longer to complete than a telephone call would for every tenant

Answer: The service still exists, but reaching it now assumes a device and a skill

Reports from the younger group held steady, so the fall is about the route to the service rather than about repairs being needed less. A change of channel redistributes access without any decision to exclude anyone, which is how uneven change usually appears in the data.

A musician uploads a video of her own arrangement of a nineteenth-century folk melody. YouTube's Content ID system, in operation since 2007, matches the audio to a reference file supplied by a record label and the advertising revenue is diverted to the label. Which description of the situation is accurate?

• The upload has been removed from the platform following an order made by a court
• The label has been granted copyright in the folk melody itself
• An automated match, not a court, has decided who earns from the upload
• The performer has lost the copyright in her own recording

Answer: An automated match, not a court, has decided who earns from the upload

Content ID is a private matching system operated by the platform, so the money moves before any legal finding and the uploader carries the burden of disputing it. The melody itself is out of copyright, and the performer keeps her rights; what she loses is the default position in the argument.

South Korea required real-name verification before posting on large websites from 2007, and its Constitutional Court struck the requirement down in 2012, finding little evidence that abusive comment had fallen. Which claim does this case support?

• Anonymous posting becomes technically impossible once a country requires identification
• Courts in every jurisdiction treat anonymity as a protected part of expression
• Abusive comment on a site falls whenever the number of posters falls
• Identifying speakers does not by itself remove the behaviour it targets

Answer: Identifying speakers does not by itself remove the behaviour it targets

The case is evidence about one mechanism in one jurisdiction: attaching a legal name to a post changed who could speak more than it changed how people spoke. The first two options overreach from a single national ruling, which is the standard error when a case is used as a general law.