ŠINDELKA, D. Informační a komunikační technologie a referendum o Brexitu [online]. Brno: Vysoké učení technické v Brně. Fakulta elektrotechniky a komunikačních technologií. 2020.
Dan Šindelka's primary aim of his thesis is to describe Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) used in the 2016 UK European Union membership referendum, commonly known as the 'Brexit' referendum. However, Mr. Šindelka also promises in his abstract to provide a desription of referendums in the UK and because of these promises the review below will read like a 'night and day' commentary of this Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde thesis. Focusing on the daylight of Dr. Jekyll, Dan does a pretty good job in chapters 2, 3 and 4.1 and 4.2 in describing the many different ICTs that were available by the time of the Brexit referendum (i.e. chapter 2), the effect of ICTs on the Brexit referendum itself (i.e. chapter 3) and the effects of ICTs beyond the Brexit referendum, particularly the GDPR and Cambridge Analytica (4.1 and 4.2). What I especially liked was Fig. 3-2 on p. 31 which shows how a totally different issue like bullfighting to 'Stop Animal Abuse' was used by the Vote Leave as a micro-targeting advertisement on Facebook by the Vote Leave side to get British voters to vote 'Leave'! The Mr. Hyde in this thesis can be found in Chapter 1. Though he was warned in earlier comments made by me on his semester project, Dan still did not consult with me regarding British politics and history even though I am, without being immodest, an expert in this field--and this is shown in this chapter! Mr. Šindelka still has no conception that Great Britain for more than three centuries relied on the concept of the 'supremacy of Parliament' in governing their country. This concept is never mentioned here, but it should have been since Prime Minister Cameron's decision to call a referendum was like playing with matches in a shed filled with fireworks and dynamite! In addition, on p. 12 Dan uses the 51.9% Leave, 48.1% Remain result to use a fallacious argument by writing "These numbers suggest that over half [the] people in each part of the UK wanted to leave the EU". Only grade 9 teachers would say that to their students in an introductory lesson British elections (and since I love election maps, I could have shown Dan the colored map of the Czech Republic showing the results of the 2018 Presidential election which had a similar result). What is even worse was his totally wrong fact that in the 1975 referendum on British entry into the EEC "there was no fear of immigration in the UK". He should read Enoch Powell's 1968 'Rivers of Blood' speech on immigration and look at poll results on immigration in the 1970s in the UK! And the UK being 'the sick man of Europe' in the 1970s is really a cliche which should be put to rest, and at the very least, Dan should have provided some evidence why the British elite kept using this self-flagellating term of themselves then! Finally, the author made the mistake of only briefly referring to US 2016 Presidential Election and then concentrating on the 2018 Irish referendum on abortion. His time would have been better spent on adding more beef to the 2016 US election. Finally, his grammar and style in this paper was a bit shaky in places. For example, at the beginning of chapter 1 on p. 10 he uses the numeral 13 as the first word, when it should have been written out, and then a few lines later he ends that part by writing only "Structure of referendum"--no sentence with no punctuation which made no sense, especially since ch. 1.1.1 is subtitled 'Structure of referendum'. Though on many pages the grammar and vocabulary was OK, on other pages, there were numerous errors. On p. 19 in the last paragraph he wrote '...Facebook begun to force...', then 'Facebook had given the developers a one-year to change their app...' and 'Their app was used only by 320.000 Facebook users....' (I guess this app had no future with only 320 users!) But in conclusion, even though my criticism has been much longer than my praise here, Mr. Šindelka still accomplished his thesis task in a good enough manner by highlighting the way different ICTs affected the Brexit referendum and beyond by using colorful examples too, so he does deserve a 'C' for his work.
Bakalářská práce pana Šindelky splnila zadání. Z práce je patrné, že student provedl extenzivní výzkum metod sběru a analýzy dat a způsoby jejich použití, či spíše zneužití, uvádí i na příkladech nejen BREXITu, ale i irském referendu a amerických prezidentských volbách. Student se rovněž zabývá historií britských referend a samotnou podstatou BREXITu. Po obsahové stránce tedy práce obsahuje většinu potřebných informací, problém je však ve způsobu jejich podání. Práce působí značně nepřehledně a chaoticky, např. už v kapitole 1.3.2.1 autor operuje s firmou AIQ a zmiňuje kanadskou vládu ovšem bez jakéhokoliv kontextu. Vysvětlení se čtenář dočká až v kapitole 3. Řazení kapitol tedy není ideální a práce navíc vůbec neobsahuje křížové odkazy, zcela chybí seznam zkratek, vhodný by byl i seznam zainteresovaných subjektů. Zejména podkapitoly ve 2. kapitole by měli být lépe uvozeny a měl by být lépe osvětlen jejich účel. Z formálního hlediska práce rovněž obsahuje jisté nedostatky. Krom drobných chyb v zarovnání a formátování se vyskytují i chyby závažnější, zejména v citačním aparátu např. opakovaně se vyskytující odkaz „(BBC News, 2016)“ není možno v seznamu literatury dohledat. Úvodní odstavec v kapitole 1 končí nedokončenou větou. Práce je psána formálním stylem, i když místy sklouzává spíše do populárně-naučného. Z gramatického hlediska obsahuje závažné chyby, např. již v 1. větě abstraktu chybí sloveso, dále se vyskytují chyby ve shodě podmětu s přísudkem, chyby ve slovosledu, užití časů a přirozeně i chyby méně závažné, zejména ve členech. Jejich výskyt však není příliš častý a, dle mého názoru, lze konstatovat, že práce je z jazykového hlediska průměrná a některé chyby mohly být odstraněny důslednější korekturou. Student, dle mého názoru, naplnil zadání a splnil požadavky kladené na bakalářkou práci, proto ji doporučuji k obhajobě a hodnotím známkou C 70 bodů.
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