"When a human being becomes a set of data on a website like Facebook, he or she is reduced. Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility. In a way it’s a transcendent experience: we lose our bodies, our messy feelings, our desires, our fears. It reminds me that those of us who turn in disgust from what we consider an overinflated liberal-bourgeois sense of self should be careful what we wish for: our denuded networked selves don’t look more free, they just look more owned."
This is so true! Being connected to the internet, really anything with technology, makes you lose part of your Self. I know I am addicted to the internet, two weeks ago my roommate and I tried to go the day without Facebook and Twitter, and sadly, that was hard. My individualism is reduced because I do what everyone else my age does, I check Facebook multiple times a day. Conforming, that is what I am doing with Facebook. I conform to what everyone else is doing because I don't want to be left out when it comes to knowing what Sally from home posted as her status.
This also reminds me of the video we watched in class on Ray Kurzwell. He said how he predicts that all of our brains will be backed up onto a hard drive, we will have internet capability in our brains. I want to know what is next then? Having all of our brains on the same networked? Hooked onto the same server? Then there will be hackers who break into where all of your thoughts are stored. From that point forward, nothing will be safe, not even your deepest thoughts and fears. This does not sound like a world I would like to live in. What is the point of living in a world where nothing can be private. Everyone will soon know everything about you, and that is scary. Everything that is said in the paragraph I quoted will be true. We will no longer be free.
No comments:
Post a Comment