LO-11: Societal Impacts of Digital Art

For this Week’s LO, I chose to read into NFTs and the issues that are connected to them. I read the articles from Time and PlagiarismToday. As for the topic, NFTs are also called Non-Fungible Tokens. They are blockchained based digital files. This means that they are not easily messed with (as blockchain makes them public ledgers on the net). This makes ownership very concrete and clear. Furthermore, because they are non-fungible, the price of said tokens/files vary and are decided by producer and consumer.

This has led to a market boom where NFTs (whether they are art, videos, music, etc.) are being sold for big bucks.

However, while it is intended for a way for online copyright for all, problems have arisen. These include bots taking all and any online files and making them NFTs to sell – very bad. Another problem is that NFTs have a considerable starting gap to overcome, thereby keeping many from participating, such as the Times article said, artists of color. A final problem is that the whole market is not that beneficial to the environment, as it requires massive amounts of energy to continue – energy that comes from fossil fuels.

Overall, NFTs are causing big issues, but issues that can be solved relatively fast as it is a growing market that everyone wants to get a slice of.

Articles I read from Time and PlagiarismToday.