- 注册
- 2002-10-07
- 消息
- 402,179
- 荣誉分数
- 76
- 声望点数
- 0
It was the first mountain goat I’d ever seen.
There I am, outside Banff in Alberta, somewhere, smiling like an idiot, pointing to the lazy oaf and his mates chewing on the grass behind me.
Ah, memories. I got the chance this week, as so many people have, to retrace my digital footprints.
And I’ll admit it, I couldn’t help but to smile at the photos, conversations and searches so conveniently collected (and now readily available for download) care of Google, Facebook and Twitter.
There were funny ones, awkward ones and heartbreaking ones. There we are, at the Fortress of Louisbourg, in Cape Breton. There you are, as seen through the hole in the sole of the shoe you’d kicked off for our picnic in the park.
I hadn’t been expecting this to be fun. I was, you see, on the hunt for that most precious of millennial commodities: outrage.
News coverage this week has shown Big Brother caught in the act, recording our conversations, memories and movements, and selling them off to those who would manipulate what we buy and what we believe.
We had finally pulled back the curtain on the Orwellian horror of our times. Cue the indignation! The hashtags! The memes! The Facebook statuses … well, anyway.
I’m sorry. Please understand. It’s not that I don’t love a good, fast-moving bandwagon. But it just seems a little late for outrage over “privacy.”
Privacy is dead. And we killed it, gleefully and willingly.
Who’s watching you?
I think we’d do it again.
For more than I decade, I’ve been pouring out my rants and my rages on social media platforms. I threw the best and worst parts of myself out there … wherever ‘there’ was, and I really didn’t know, in the hopes that someone I knew or was connected to would see it, would “like” it, would be touched by it. That somehow, what I felt on a given day would matter to someone.
It all seems a little … pathetic, somehow, doesn’t it? Why did I do that?
Not to get too contemplative, but I think it’s probably the same reason humans sent golden records loaded with pictures and sounds and music on the Voyager probes bound for interstellar space in the 1970s. The problem is, we’ve never heard back from ET. And while we may or may not be alone in the universe, we sure have felt lonely here on planet Earth.
Social media’s success has been an undeniable testament to our need, as people, to connect with our fellows, whether emotionally (read: baby/cat/vacation photos on Facebook), intellectually (read: sniping, awful conversation on Twitter), or just drunkenly (read: Instagram , Snapchat, and ‘Hey what are you doing’ texts.)
The Google app on an iPad.
As more and more of us left our hometowns and families, and travelled across the country or the world for school, work, adventure and play, we found ourselves increasingly without a physical support network.
Social media’s appeal – that it could help us connect with each other, over huge, Canadian-style distances, despite years of absence, in ways quick and easy – was too good to pass up. And, yes, it probably overwhelmed our common sense.
Texting, messaging and posting have meant that we are never that most awful of things … alone.
We flocked to them because “privacy” was the last thing we wanted. We wanted so much more to feel connected, to be a part of something.
I’m not mourning our loss of privacy this week. I’m not sure we’d recognize privacy if we saw it anymore.
What we are more likely pondering is just what these powerful, multi-national corporate entities and their unnamed partners may do with the towering piles of data we’ve freely given them.
And we should be worried.
Picture a world in which you’re denied medicare because a social media bot concludes you didn’t do enough to take care of yourself. (Look at those pictures at you drinking at the bar, sir. And how often did you order pizza?) Imagine being detained at some border because of a criticism (Shut down Guantanamo!) you posted in a righteous moment.
RELATED: A North Carolina man posted profane Facebook comments slamming Trump. Then Secret Service agents arrived at his door
This summer, the European Union will roll out its General Data Protection Regulation. Observers say the new legislation has the potential to change the internet, by levelling heavy-duty penalties (4 per cent of a company’s value or 20 million euros, whichever is more) for each and every misuse of EU residents’ data. Given the transnational nature of the internet, the EU’s push to protect its residents may drag other countries, including ours, into adopting similar measures.
Let’s hope it does.
We need to make smart online choices with our data and what we share. We should demand that politicians make companies honestly represent what they’ve collected from us and what they will do with it. Let’s make consent forms readable documents, instead of legalese-draped text boxes we mindlessly click through to get to the next screen.
Transparency needs to be a spirit that is embraced in all corners, not a token requirement to which we pay lip service.
The stakes here are very real, and this past week those of us still sleeping through the digital age got “woke” to the virtual reality we’re living in.
As for the outrage, though, I still can’t get behind it.
Say cheese.
Social media has been a human revolution.
And, as with most revolutions, it may end up empowering all the wrong people.
But let’s not pretend we didn’t cheer it on.
查看原文...
There I am, outside Banff in Alberta, somewhere, smiling like an idiot, pointing to the lazy oaf and his mates chewing on the grass behind me.
Ah, memories. I got the chance this week, as so many people have, to retrace my digital footprints.
And I’ll admit it, I couldn’t help but to smile at the photos, conversations and searches so conveniently collected (and now readily available for download) care of Google, Facebook and Twitter.
There were funny ones, awkward ones and heartbreaking ones. There we are, at the Fortress of Louisbourg, in Cape Breton. There you are, as seen through the hole in the sole of the shoe you’d kicked off for our picnic in the park.
I hadn’t been expecting this to be fun. I was, you see, on the hunt for that most precious of millennial commodities: outrage.
News coverage this week has shown Big Brother caught in the act, recording our conversations, memories and movements, and selling them off to those who would manipulate what we buy and what we believe.
We had finally pulled back the curtain on the Orwellian horror of our times. Cue the indignation! The hashtags! The memes! The Facebook statuses … well, anyway.
I’m sorry. Please understand. It’s not that I don’t love a good, fast-moving bandwagon. But it just seems a little late for outrage over “privacy.”
Privacy is dead. And we killed it, gleefully and willingly.
Who’s watching you?
I think we’d do it again.
For more than I decade, I’ve been pouring out my rants and my rages on social media platforms. I threw the best and worst parts of myself out there … wherever ‘there’ was, and I really didn’t know, in the hopes that someone I knew or was connected to would see it, would “like” it, would be touched by it. That somehow, what I felt on a given day would matter to someone.
It all seems a little … pathetic, somehow, doesn’t it? Why did I do that?
Not to get too contemplative, but I think it’s probably the same reason humans sent golden records loaded with pictures and sounds and music on the Voyager probes bound for interstellar space in the 1970s. The problem is, we’ve never heard back from ET. And while we may or may not be alone in the universe, we sure have felt lonely here on planet Earth.
Social media’s success has been an undeniable testament to our need, as people, to connect with our fellows, whether emotionally (read: baby/cat/vacation photos on Facebook), intellectually (read: sniping, awful conversation on Twitter), or just drunkenly (read: Instagram , Snapchat, and ‘Hey what are you doing’ texts.)
The Google app on an iPad.
As more and more of us left our hometowns and families, and travelled across the country or the world for school, work, adventure and play, we found ourselves increasingly without a physical support network.
Social media’s appeal – that it could help us connect with each other, over huge, Canadian-style distances, despite years of absence, in ways quick and easy – was too good to pass up. And, yes, it probably overwhelmed our common sense.
Texting, messaging and posting have meant that we are never that most awful of things … alone.
We flocked to them because “privacy” was the last thing we wanted. We wanted so much more to feel connected, to be a part of something.
I’m not mourning our loss of privacy this week. I’m not sure we’d recognize privacy if we saw it anymore.
What we are more likely pondering is just what these powerful, multi-national corporate entities and their unnamed partners may do with the towering piles of data we’ve freely given them.
And we should be worried.
Picture a world in which you’re denied medicare because a social media bot concludes you didn’t do enough to take care of yourself. (Look at those pictures at you drinking at the bar, sir. And how often did you order pizza?) Imagine being detained at some border because of a criticism (Shut down Guantanamo!) you posted in a righteous moment.
RELATED: A North Carolina man posted profane Facebook comments slamming Trump. Then Secret Service agents arrived at his door
This summer, the European Union will roll out its General Data Protection Regulation. Observers say the new legislation has the potential to change the internet, by levelling heavy-duty penalties (4 per cent of a company’s value or 20 million euros, whichever is more) for each and every misuse of EU residents’ data. Given the transnational nature of the internet, the EU’s push to protect its residents may drag other countries, including ours, into adopting similar measures.
Let’s hope it does.
We need to make smart online choices with our data and what we share. We should demand that politicians make companies honestly represent what they’ve collected from us and what they will do with it. Let’s make consent forms readable documents, instead of legalese-draped text boxes we mindlessly click through to get to the next screen.
Transparency needs to be a spirit that is embraced in all corners, not a token requirement to which we pay lip service.
The stakes here are very real, and this past week those of us still sleeping through the digital age got “woke” to the virtual reality we’re living in.
As for the outrage, though, I still can’t get behind it.
Say cheese.
Social media has been a human revolution.
And, as with most revolutions, it may end up empowering all the wrong people.
But let’s not pretend we didn’t cheer it on.
查看原文...
