The future's transparent

[andrewducker]

Two articles I've read recently - Kids, The Internet, and the End of Privacy and The Internet Makes us Naked both seem to be surfing the zeitgeist that kicked off with The Transparent Society (and in some ways with Andy Warhol's famous pronouncement).

There seems to be a definite generational divide between those people who grew up after the internet explosion and are quite happy to slap their entire lives up on the web for anyone to read, and those people who grew up before it and find the idea of sharing their life with random strangers completely incomprehensible and pretty darn scary. And amongst the younger crowd there's a more general movement towards believing that a person shouldn't be ashamed of the things that previous generations used to keep hidden. That if you look around you'll always find someone wierder and more niche, and the things that the vast majority of us do aren't actually that strange - they just weren't talked about in the past, so it seemed that we were alone with our passions.

It happened with homosexuality - the more people came out, the easier it was to see that "they" were everywhere, and they weren't that strange. That, after all, was the point of pride marches - to make it clear that people weren't alone, and they had nothing to be ashamed of. It's one of the plus points of cities - we're exposed to so many different kinds of people that after a while we expect to see it all the time and "other" isn't anything special any more. The internet brings that exposure to everyone - it becomes much harder to hide the diversity of the big city from your children when it comes into your home, you have to deliberately cut yourself off from the world in a way that most people aren't willing to.

I'm sure some people will say this is just a fad - but I really don't think it is for the new generation, and I think that it's something that will only grow stronger with time. I'll be keeping my fingers crossed

(The icon was chosen at random, but it's a nice synchronicity)

Comments

[octopoid-horror.livejournal.com]

I like the online/rl divide amongst people like you and I, and many of my friends.

You can post about personal stuff on livejournal, and other people will read it and comment, but it won't get mentioned rl, but can just lurk in the background. It's simpler than -real- conversations, less awkward too ;-)

And you can use emoticons.

Someone on my friends list a while ago mentioned someone (presumably a child of this new generation) mentioning their myspace site while applying for an apartment that a co-worker was putting up for rent. Their myspace site was mostly full of pictures of them partying drunkenly semi-clad. Funnily enough, they didn't get the apartment.

[surliminal.livejournal.com]

I was told tonight that people are putting their eBay reputation scores on cvs when applying for jobs.

THis fills me with utter horror and despair:-)

[andrewducker]

Depends on the job. If it's looking for responsibility and retail experience then I'd say it was better than lots of stuff you see on CVs.

I've been the personal reference for several people in the past. Never understood the point myself...

[heron61.livejournal.com]

Depends on the job. If it's looking for responsibility and retail experience then I'd say it was better than lots of stuff you see on CVs.

I completely agree. It seems as good a judge of various sorts of reliability as anything else.

In any case, one thing that interests me is thinking about the various 30+ sorts on lj who do post all manner of things in their journals, and how such people differ from the many people in that age group who either don't have blogs or use them only for politics or hobby-related discussions. I'm betting that unless the internet in some way either collapses or becomes almost exclusively some wretched corporate-controlled media source (and both options seems rather unlikely) that the current openness is only going to continue to grow. We're within 2-3 years of practical real-time wireless video feeds from glasses (or other) mounted cameras.

[meaningrequired.livejournal.com]

Heh, I think theres having sense, and not having sense :)

[andrewducker]

If you haven't read David Brin's "Earth" then I highly recommend that you do so. The plot itself isn't great (and the ending is completely out of left field), but as a world-building exercise it's fantastic - and the video feeds are very much a part of that.

[channelpenguin.livejournal.com]

I got halfway through that book once, but it started to grate too much and so I never finished it.

[heron61.livejournal.com]

I've not read it because I've heard it wasn't one of his best, but I'll give it a look. Similarly, despite the rather dodgy title, The Gumshoe, the Witch, and the Virtual Corpse by Keith Hartman, features some excellent near future world-building, which also includes such cameras.

[thishardenedarm.livejournal.com]

i was looking, by way of my inbuilt bent, for something to problematise in your analysis, but its pretty sound (ie i agree)

except of course for the millions of starving poor...those pesky untermenschen always spoil it for everyone else.

[andrewducker]

Well, yes. They have completely different problems.

On the other hand, the number of people starving to death in the first world has decreased significantly, and the levels of income in India and China have been shooting up in the last decade or so. If we can stop the population spiralling out of cotnrol we may well run out of famine victims eventually.

Not this decade though.