Muffs blog post today found/had/got/started me thinking about technology and how it alters reality. It is an interesting time we live in. Experiencing what I jokingly call “live” time and “Memorex” time. Live time, sleeping, cooking, family gatherings, talking to a neighbor. Memorex time, cell phones, twitter, face book, blogs, and surveillance cameras.
In live time, I can maintain some resemblance of privacy. In Memorex time everything and anything is fair game. In live time, I can share a personal medical issue with a trustworthy friend and the chance of my grandniece ever knowing about it is minuscule. Share it in Memorex time and conceivably 40% of the worlds population could know.
When these two realities meet, it gets interesting. I like technology. My interest in computers started in high school and never stopped. My expectation of personal privacy a given. Then the two realities slowly started to intertwine. The Memorex reality has grown exponentially. A new generation out there has never known a world where live time did not include constant Memorex time updates. We now have terms such as In Real Life (IRL) and face time to distinguish Memorex time from live time.
I started making the silly videos and used u toob (yes spelled wrong to deter the web crawlers) to host them. Then the take down notices arrived. One for a “copy righted” song playing in the back ground on a truck radio in a bit of footage and the other musical tune I used in a video that had been on the tube for years all of a sudden became a problem. One more notice and they threatened to take down my site. Seriously?
Then the intersection where the major players face plant and goo gal seem to think that my online Memorex persona needs intertwining with just about anything you can think of. No, you do not need my cell phone numbers, no that g person is not the fb person etc., etc., etc. …
The decision to blog on a given day is a big one. If I share X it is almost a given that the new Memorex generation will find it and in many cases use it in the live reality. If some members of my live reality were not arse holes this would be ok. Take the scum living in the townhouses here. If I shared a photo of a new toy here, is it an invitation to be ripped off? If I share something, would that end up read by some family member I have not seen in years?
To me blogging is a thread interwoven in the mix. Bloggers come and go. Some of us choose not to post for periods brief or long. Just a while back, someone that had not blogged for a few years posted an update. It was nice to know they were still about. In this intersection between live and Memorex we all have different expectations.
What are yours?
So ends this ramble.
A lot to think about here! I got frightened when items for which I had browsed, in the hope of purchasing, began to appear on other sites. [cue the eerie music] Then today, I looked up a recipe, and pop-ups appeared about where I could buy the main ingredients at supermarkets close by. [more music] So, I think our privacy is just about shot on this inter webby thing. Good post — thanks for making me think about it. And thanks for the shot-out!
The pop ups are at the least annoying. I try and block them in my browser. It seems that almost everyone (individual or corporate) seem to think they need or have the right to know everything about us. Today the goo gile search on my cell phone app let me know it needs to access contacts, calender, location, identity, text messages, media files, and just about everything else on the phone. Privacy?
Gosh, I lost track of you since I stopped posting on Meandering. Nice to find you through Muff’s blog. I still enjoy blogging, but in a less wordy way on my photo blog.
I took all my saved reader contact lists through the years and imported them into one reader. Now I have hundreds that I need to go through and remove the ones where the blog no longer exists. Your photos are one of the highlights in my reading.