Finally. I was afraid that I was the only one. Nicholas Carr wrote an interesting piece in the Atlantic Monthly, stating that his ever increasing dependance of the quick speedy information highway is making him stupid. Mainly it is chipping away at his capacity for concentration and contemplation and that it may have an affect on our future society.
In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates bemoaned the development of writing. He feared that, as people came to rely on the written word as a substitute for the knowledge they used to carry inside their heads, they would, in the words of one of the dialogue’s characters, “cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful.” And because they would be able to “receive a quantity of information without proper instruction,” they would “be thought very knowledgeable when they are for the most part quite ignorant.” They would be “filled with the conceit of wisdom instead of real wisdom.”
Sadly I have to agree with him. I barely made it through his five page article. These days I have trouble digging deep into a book, thinking that in my mind I can just hit command+F and do a search for what I am looking for then be done with it. Unfortuantly I can’t and it took me a semester of school to actually make myself concentrate, read every word and dig out the meaning of the book.
With the invention of the internet, large vast deposits of information became available to our finger tips. I can shop online, find new restaurants, read books, pay my bills and bank. Most importantly I can find old and new friends through the use of social networking, such as Myspace and Facebook. However with all this information and opportunity I am reminded of the advice Peter Parker’s uncle use to give: “With great power comes great responsibility.” Of course he was talking about Spider-man’s super human abilities but I believe this is advice we need to adhere to when it comes to relinquishing our personal information into cyberspace, most importantly when it comes to social networks.
Advertising on social networks has been a work in progress considering it is a new technology. There is a wealthy amount of information for advertisers if they know how to use it. One of the social networks, Facebook, has an idea that involves a new advertising technology, similar to Google’s Adsence. Marketers can target users based on the information they reveal in their personal profiles. Facebook’s goal is to refine the technology to even predict what the user would be interested in before the user even makes it known. These ads with extra-sensory perception will show up in the “news feed” section of the user’s profile.
I found this interesting since I was just discussing Facebook recently. Caution must be advised seeing Facebook owns the site and so they own everything you input on their site. That is a right they have and Facebook proclaims that it protects that personal information from those willing to use it in a negative way. That includes your credit card number even though there is nothing to really buy on their network. However, what they really mean is they will protect your information from those who are not willing to pay for it. This is the double standard the new social networks live by.
Facebook is just one of the suspects and the internet in general is the ring leader. I had this same discussion with my mother about a month ago when I realized that our identities are not private anymore. I had an old running buddy find me a few weeks ago just by doing a Google search for the term “Justin Leavitt graphic designer.” Employers actively research a candidates Myspace and Facebook profile. The music we like, the movies we watch, your favorite color, and credit card numbers are out there floating around in cyberspace, waiting for someone to find it. Companies are that someone willing to search for it. (And maybe the government but this post is not for conspiracy theories.) So remember, we have a lot of power at our finger tips so we need to use it responsibly because nobody has the right to your identity but you.
Remember back in August when I said we were about to lose our internet freedom to big companies? Well looks like we have to worry about it again because the phone and cable companies have decided not to listen. So once again we have to deal with the Net Neutrality issue again.
Go to Savetheinternet.com to, once again, sign petitions and what not to keep the internet free because if you don’t, I am not paying extra just so my website will load faster for you.
[tags]net neutrailty, save the internet, internet, community, congress, Jeff Pulver, FCC, freedom[/tags]