Posts with tag "society"

Doing the dog paddle to the future

Category: Opinion
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Posted 591 days ago

When I was walking back from getting coffee for myself and my wife I found myself thinking about how we are getting so close to the year 2020 and how much I have seen happen in my world from when I was a kid in the 1960′s.

I have seen president’s assassinated, watched as man landed on the moon for the first time (on my 13th birthday to boot). I have seen students killed at Kent State as they protested for a better world and watched as the War Measures Act was enacted in Canada as a response to the FLQ uprising.

Then as I neared home carrying coffee I realized something. @020 is just around the corner and our world, our society hasn’t gotten any better. In fact it could be argued that it has gotten worse.

There is no Star Trek future beckoning us and chances are it never will be but instead driven into copyright and patent hell if our current technological mess is any indication. Any of the moral and social mores that may have guided a possible future reflective of Star Trek have left the building.

The Fallacy Of The ‘Safe’ Internet

Category: Technology
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Posted 1691 days ago

There was a post over on the cnet blogs this morning by Dennis O’Reilly where he was talking about the newest web threat called clickjacking (isn’t that just so urban and cute). This new threat (PC only at the moment) doesn’t care which browser you are using or whether you have javascript disabled because all it takes is simply clicking on a link to infect your computer with some sort of malware.

While Dennis was really talking about a specific type of Internet safety it got me thinking about the larger idea of being safe on the web and really how ridiculous that idea is.

You can run all the security software you want, governments can try all the legislation they want and lawyers can sue as much as they like the fact is that the Internet has never been and never will be a safe place. Part of the disconnect we have that leads to this delusion of being able to enforce some kind of safety is that we think that the Internet is a separate entity from our physical lives.

This is why we say things like online, offline or cyberspace, meatspace. We are trying to make ourselves think that our daily world we move through is separate and distinct from the electronic one we spend a growing amount of time in.

It’s not.

In the beginning due to its rarity the Internet may have been a separate entity but that has changed and now it is more of an extension of our daily lives. We weave it seamlessly amongst our daily activities without even blinking an eye and this will only become more prevalent as we move forward.

Due to the increased mobility of our society through the use of cell phones that are close to doubling for mobile computing platforms and the increasing web of WiFi networks we are no longer tied though an electronic umbilical cord to a stationary place.

With this ubiquity of the Internet it is inevitable that it mimics all the aspects of our society. It doesn’t matter how politically correct we have tried to make our world. It doesn’t matter how hard we have tried to keep everyone under the ever present eye of the growing police state. Bad things are and will always be done by bad people. Throughout the total history of mankind people have been doing bad things to other people and even though we might like to believe that we are better than our history it is stupid to think so.

I am not suggesting that we not protect the young and the weak – the stupid can fend for themselves – but to think that we will be able to turn this electronic mirror image of ourselves into some new kind of perfect society is ridiculous and dangerous. Just as our non-electronic world is sometimes unkind and dangerous so is the electronic version we have created in our own image.

And maybe that isn’t such a bad thing.

Social media will never have society defining moments

Category: Technology
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Posted 1934 days ago

When I was going through my teen years there was no such thing as the Internet; or even its predecessor AARPNET, and much of what we got for news of what was happening in the world came from magazines and newspapers. Even at that point television wasn’t the predominate method of getting news; although I think that really changed with the assassinations of JFK and MLK. For my family with the constant influx of magazines like Time and Newsweek dinner time discussions revolved around the events as written and photographed within their pages.

As much as I know find myself surrounded with more news and information on a daily basis than I could ever have imagined when compared to my youthful access to world events in the past; I still think back to those times and wonder if the treasure that those magazines were as I pulled them from our mailbox at the end of our lane gave me a clearer window into the world than what the constantly updating feeds do today.

This thought was brought to a certain clarity when I read a post by Jason Kottke on his blog called kottke.org in which he relates a story of Eddie Adams who gave an interview to Jonah Goldberg in the National Review. In the interview Eddie states unequivocally that he wishes he had never taken the picture of General Nguyen Ngoc Loan shooting a man in the head in the middle of a Vietnam street, It was this photograph that won Eddie Adams a Pulitzer Prize but as Eddie wrote in the Times magazine once and quoted in Jonah’s post:

“The general killed the Viet Cong; I killed the general with my camera. Still photographs are the most powerful weapon in the world. People believe them, but photographs do lie, even without manipulation. They are only half-truths. What the photograph didn’t say was, ‘What would you do if you were the general at that time and place on that hot day, and you caught the so-called bad guy after he blew away one, two or three American soldiers?’”

This one photograph had a profound effect around the world and affected many people. During this time there was another photograph as well that spoke to the soul of the the country – the soul of the world and that was the one taken by John Filo on May 4th 1970 at Kent State University. That is the photograph you see at the top of this post.

As one who was growing up during it was photographs like these and of Armstrong stepping foot on the moon that are forever engrained in the minds of those of use that grew up during that period of time. Over time the guttural effect of them may have dissipated but they still maintain a powerful effect of historic moments as they were happening. There was no staging of events, there was no makeup for the participants. Everything was raw and real and the agony or joy reached out and touched our souls.

It was photographs like those that forever changed our society – changed the heart and soul of many people like myself. It made the loss of innocence a palatable tsunami of gut wrenching emotional reactions. Photographs like those became defining moments of our society as they raced around the world to be shown over and over again. With each showing their power – their effect on our society grew.

Those times though are gone now and even though the photographs that changed our society are forever in the archives of our memories we will never see the power they had to change events happen again. As we have become a society of MTV sound bites of news and photographs are a cell phone away time has become compressed into shorter and shorter cycles the power of a single photograph to effect social change has become a thing of the past.

Instead we distract ourselves with socially mundane things like the newest social network and other so-called social changing technological events that promise to make our world better. We look to lose ourselves in the inanity of things like YouTube or argue over which search engine is better. We look upon mega buyouts of thing like Yahoo by Microsoft as world changing events that will affect us from this point forward.

The reality is that none of these things are not even close to being society defining moments. There is nothing that happens on the Internet whether it be in photographs or opinionated news sharing that can even come close to being considered to be a social bell weather event. This isn’t because that these things don’t happen but due to the very overabundance of news and pictures we have to struggle through we don’t have the time to grasp the importance of any one single event anymore.

As much as we would like to think that otherwise the picture of a dead youth on a campus is no longer a society changing event – and will probably never be again.

The passing of the tactile generation

Category: Technology
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4 comments
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Posted 2145 days ago

Pray for the loss of a generation. Ever wondered what it is like to watch the passing away of a generation?

Well just look around you because it is happening before your very eyes; or better yet – your computer monitor. With each MP3 downloaded, with each e-book read on a cell phone, every movie saved to TiVo and every friend added to a social network we are seeing the gradual passing away of a generation where to touch and to hold gave us that indescribable feeling of newness and specialness.

Like Jason over at webomatica I to miss the days of the album. I still remember the pride I felt when I bought my very first album called Yes Songs by Yes. I can still feel the rush when I played my second album Brain Salad Surgery by Emerson Lake and Palmer for the very first time. Or the incredible Halloween night where two of my friends and I sat on a hillside killing a 40 pounder of Tequila as Uriah Heep’s Demon’s and Wizards blasted from the stereo in the converted one room schoolhouse as the bonfire reached for the stars. It is memories like that which are all associated with a physical thing you could hold in your hands that are forever ingrained in my memories.

And it isn’t just albums that can invoke those memories for just like them I still remember the reading the night away as I made my way through A Stranger in A Strange Land by Robert Heinlein for the first of many times. Then there are the times I spent at Walden Pond with Henry Thoreau where each turn of the page made one feel like the words were alive. Will the future look upon the opening of a cd case of the Library of Congress with the same bated breath as those that discovered and studied the Dead Sea Scrolls – I don’t think so.

Then there is a thing called friendship which has been reduced to nothing more than a link in an email or a checkbox on some electronic page. Friends have become icons with miscellaneous ramblings beside them. That isn’t friendship. Friends come from being able to look at one another in the eye, to be able to shake hands, to share hugs and to share tears in times of joy and in times of sorrow. Those things can never be replaced by checkmarks or webcam images. Friends aren’t networked one’s and zero’s – they are a real part of what makes us who we are.

In our rush to a digitized nirvana I fear we will lose one of the most important things that make us human. The ability to touch the world around us and the things that make it up. The tomes of knowledge which by the very touch of their pages inspires dreams being replaced by PDF’s of electronic blandness. The music of our world being reduced to 99cent bytes of proprietary sound waves devoid of the continuity of Rick Wakeman’s Journey to the Center of the Earth or a Bach concerto or the raw soul of Edgar Winter’s Tobacco Road. Then most important of all – friendships - which are being rendered as webcam images in so-called social networks which reduces our tactile interaction to nothing more than keypresses on a cell phone or keyboard.

As much as those of us who relish in the sense of the touch of a book’s pages or the grooves of an album or the taste of a beer shared with friends on a hot summer eve it is inevitable that we are seeing the last of these things fade with that evening’s setting sun. While the youth of our world will snicker and and text message each other about those silly old farts as they download the newest video montages I feel sorry for them because they will never experience the true power of touch.

And Jason … this is really showing one’s age

It’s not the network — it’s the people

Category: Technology
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5 comments
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Posted 2207 days ago

Where is that evil internet that is corrupting our children? Just a bit of a disclaimer at the start of this post. I have had a lousy day trying to rebuild my wife’s media machine and having nothing but problems doing it – so if I seem a tad crusty in my tone – tough – I am and the subject matter just begs a crusty attitude.

One of the subjects that always gets me going when the discussion comes to the Internet and the abuses piled on it is the whining and crying by the adults about the dangers it is putting their children in and why isn’t the government doing anything about it. This attitude was illustrated in a post today by Duncan Riley on TechCrunch in his relating a new survey that found that people think the Internet is more dangerous than school violence or sexually transmitted diseases

The survey found that Internet safety is a relatively new health concern amongst parents. Women were more likely to rate it as a big problem; 32% of women report Internet safety as a big problem compared with only 21% of men. Internet safety had no differences in proportion of concern by education status, income level or marital status.

Well lets set one thing straight right off the bat. The Internet is not dangerous, it doesn’t cause the mental and physical anguish that bullies do and nor will it give you an STD. The Internet is one’s and zero’s .. it is a benign pathway for the sharing of information. It does not instigate pedophilia, rape, theft or any such other type of crime.

People rape people, people molest children and people steal from other people and they have for as long as man has walked on two legs and grunted “UGG” at one another. The only things that has changed between then and now is that we have learned to stick a knife in the other persons back while smiling and pirate a movie all at the same time.

The short end of this is that people will use whatever tools are available to abuse others, to steal from others. After all pedophiles have been around since before the Romans and Greeks and let’s not go into the old Et Tu, Brute. To blame the one’s and zero’s of the Internet is nothing less than abrogating our responsibility as individuals and members of society.

It is so much easier to blame the nameless ether of the web for all our woes and foibles than it is to accept the fact that we are the one’s responsible. It’s easier to sit the kid in front of a monitor than to monitor them yourselves. How many times have you heard a parent says they had no idea what their kid was doing on the computer. Guess what – if you don’t know what they are doing then you are the one’s to blame – you are the first line of defense – not the nanny state.

You can’t even blame the providers because they are doing just what is expected of a business out to make a buck – providing a service. It is up to you and your wallet as to whether you enable them to pay their bills and buy their toys. It’s up to you not to blindly accept everything put before you without checking into it.

But no it’s easier to pass the buck to the politicians and the bureaucrats than it is to step up to the plate and get involved on a personal level. Instead of setting boundaries yourself you let the government do it for you and then when it isn’t done to your liking the ranting begins.

You can rant all you want but if you really want to know who is to blame for the misuses of the Internet then look in the mirror not the monitor.