CAT 2022 Question Paper | VARC Slot 2

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Question 21 : The passage given below is followed by four alternate summaries. Choose the option that best captures the essence of the 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.

Explanatory Answer

The paragraph given observes that the concerns about online targeting and polarisation due to the misuse of personal data by machine-learning algorithms today seem to echo Cold War-era anxieties. These concerns have inspired recent polemics about the need to rediscover solitude and disconnect.
Option B touches upon all key ideas and is the best summary among the given options.
The paragraph is about the resurfacing of debates about behaviour manipulation and privacy. Neither option A nor option C touches upon this. Further, both these options use terms that are not used in the given paragraph: option A states that digital data is 'enslaving' us and option C refers to 'artificial intelligence'. So, we rule out options A and C.
Option D implies behaviour was manipulated during the Cold War. The paragraph given does not explicitly say so. Also, this option does not touch upon ideas such as ‘freedom’ and ‘privacy’ mentioned in the paragraph.

The answer is 'With big data making personal information freely available, the debate on the nature of freedom and the need for privacy has resurfaced.'

Choice B is the correct answer.

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