The Internet Never Forgets

Posted in Blogging, Computers & Technology, Life by Elliott Back on May 22nd, 2006.

There used to be a time when your personal altercation with another man in the street had no witnesses and lived only in that moment. Today, a half dozen bystanders will capture your fist slamming into his face with their camera phones, and if you’re lucky, someone will get it on video. It used to be that someone could quietly die in their home next to a bottle of brandy, and the town would whisper. Now, a student dies over spring break and his online alcoholic ramblings are collected for mass edification on a blog. It used to be that the personal lived and died encaged in your social network, but now through online media, the personal is both immortal and pervasive.

I can see two possible reactions to this movement. The first is to completely degrade the societal notion of morality, such that people no longer can judge the character of other people they don’t know. In a way, by using the new internet media to universally and publically expose mass sin, no one can any longer be called a saint, or thought well of. The internet allows everyone to be thrown together in the same melting pot of petty crime and grievance, the slummed mix of baseborn humanity. The second is to attack the internet, and ignore the personal material posted there. In essence, the credibility of the internet as a new media would be lost in the attack on its credibility and purpose.

1984 in 30 years won’t be men with sticks watching you over TV screens. It will be a distributed folksonomy of Web 3.0 minded-individuals collaborating their user-generated media tagged to your name. 1984 is your neighbors, their cameras, and flickr.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 22nd, 2006 at 1:48 pm and is tagged with bottle of brandy, tv screens, personal material, melting pot, petty crime, man in the street, minded individuals, flickr, edification, bystanders, camera phones, altercation, internet media, grievance, ramblings, credibility, morality, folksonomy, fist, notion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback.