I Have Nothing to Hide

Diminishing privacy is absolutely terrifying to me. But like many people, I tend to see it as mostly an inevitable fact of life. I accept that I am constantly providing details about myself to the world, and cling to the hope that it won't somehow turn around and bite me in the end. No one should be completely ambivalent and not have a care in the world though. In an age of rapidly expanding identity theft it is ignorant to ignore how accessible our personal details are. Beyond the fact that some psycho could probably find you and kill you if they desired, there is also simply the fact that important and revealing things concerning your job, you, and those you care about is at least somewhat accessible to anyone who would want to do harm to you. Without a barrier between the public and private realms we have no place to be entirely comfortable and rest before returning to the public realm, suddenly it is all public and this can be a scary combination of exhausting and exhilarating.

Social Media and Privacy

I found the Newsweek article to be incredibly depressing because of the duality of terrible personal things becoming public. On the one hand it is the worst thing that could possibly happen to have a young women's most horrifying and personal moment be made public. But on the other hand it provides a catalyst for discussing and approaching the issue of rape in contemporary news. In this way it may even be possible to prevent further rapes or at least create better and more powerful consequences to hold those committing the rapes responsible.
But this doesn't only have to be applied to cases of rape, any number of embarrassing, revealing, terrifying, depressing, etc. moments of our lives can be made public. As made clear in the video we watched, even when you hit delete, those images, those experiences you may not have wanted to share are still there. Social networking we have a small amount of control over how we ourselves interact and share information, but we have no control over how others share and interact with information concerning us. That can be overwhelming and sometimes have devastating psychological impacts (KONY).

Living in a Networked World

Thus far, I have learned and discussed about the Internet and its implications quite a bit. I have discovered that there are a variety of opinions about these implications ranging from extremely optimistic to entirely pessimistic. Discovering the truth about whether the Internet and living in an age of connectedness' impact on people seems to be an almost impossible answer to find. This is the result of technology evolving so rapidly that concrete evidence about the effects it has on the human condition are hard to find. This is not for lack of trying, many people have written on and pontificated on the good and bad of the Internet and that is what we strive to explore in this course. I hope that by soaking up as much information about the Internet I will be able to construct a better concept of what the effects of it are on myself and my generation. Maybe, just maybe, I will even be able to lean towards the optimistic or pessimistic viewpoint depending on what I wind up discovering. It's clear so far that there is a brand new frontier out there that is simply inviting us to explore; what the implications of that exploration will be is up to debate.