Transparent to the world is what we are becoming...and how do we manage it? How does Big Brother manage it? Mind-blowing breakdown of boundaries, like the exhibition of skinless cadavers that revealed things we know are there but that we don't look at so intimately on a regular basis. The government and controversial data-mining issues, RIFD tagging and cell phones that track everyone all the time... Parents are trying to figure out parameters for children (see this article, on the generation gap in technology from the London Times) and new technology raises questions for us all regarding personal space, privacy, boundaries and the line between public and private.
This matters not only for our personal choices, but for the violation of boundaries and liberties taken by others without our awareness or permission.
Doesn't this site look like you could find anything out about anyone? Does that make you uneasy? Check this out about what others can find out about you from your airline ticket stub from Estate Vault Legacy blog. Will drowning in data mean an end to privacy -- read Business Week's blog on it here. Congress is considering mandatory IP snooping. Read here in Naked Conversations how businesses and universities are checking out applicants.
MotherPie on cell phone tracking: Big Mother is Here...Hansel and Gretel and Modern Tracking and No Boundaries for Virtual Youth on what this means for the 18 - 34 generation. For the rest of us, guidelines for protecting privacy and civil liberties have lagged far behind the federal money spent to keep tabs on Americans, according to Spies Among Us, an article in the 5/8 U.S.News and World Report.
My mother said, "You are what you eat" so I didn't want to be junk. Mentally, the metaphor applies. "You are what you pay attention to." And for the next gen, attention is the next phase of the information and market economy. Capturing attention and paying attention...the buzzwords. Where do the eyeballs go and where do the eyeballs stay (and who cares to track this?). Linda Stone first coined the term Continual Partial Attention (CPA)... Attention Deficit Disorder...the new media make it difficult to think about who and what owns our attention. Everything is competing for attention spans and this KansasCity.com article mentions Stone. Of course, then, there are a myriad of distractions to keep one from paying attention...to important issues. The traditional media entertainment industry is (or has been) diversional, one-way and provides passive escapes. Not necessarily so for new media.
Naked in the New World Order... And then there is the blog out of Iraq Bagdad Burning. When (anonymous) she posts as she did very recently, it is a glimpse through the new medium of blogging of what a woman sees that we otherwise wouldn't. "If only hearts could heal and souls could mend," she writes.
Update: 5/14 - USA Today ran a front-page story this weekend about the NSA's secret phone call database and the article ran the following quote. "It's an issue of our times - a huge issue," said Clayton Northouse, editor of Protecting What Matters: Technology, Security and Liberty since 9/11, published last month. Washington Post journalist James Risen's '06 book, State of War, describes what he says was called "the Program"--the ongoing eavesdropping operation, done with almost no judicial or congressional oversight, on the phone calls and emails of hundreds of Americans (and potentially millions more)--is only a chapter in his larger tale of the recent missteps and oversteps of U.S. intelligence. Here's the NYTimes on Cheney's role and the NYTimes editorial on the Ever-Expanding Secret of "the clandestine surveillance program of enormous size" and the opinion that "Congress should act responsibly in monitoring" this potentially illegal situation. William Arkin's blog for the Washington Post, Telephone Records are just the Tip of NSA's Iceberg, had 143 comments at the time of this update and provides very informative information about data mining by NSA in a new medium format. Arkin writes:"...this NSA dominated program of ingestion, digestion, and distribution of potential intelligence raises profound questions about the privacy and civil liberties of all Americans."
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