Filtered Geek

Full Circle Begins at a Point

Lately there has been a lot of talk about privacy and the internet. Applications like Google Buzz have caused quite the "buzz" about privacy. Also new sites like Please Rob Me showing the danger of posting to much about your location using social media. Is it that the internet is a bad place? Should we board up our windows and run from technology? NO!!! Of course there are risks with somthing, but lets step back for a second and think about what we have.

Just Like the Days of Old

Just think about mankind for a second; we are by nature social creatures, who require social interaction to maintain sanity and purpose in life. We started in tribes where the good of the social outweighed individuality because it allowed society to thrive and expand to what we know today. Hell, the word society is by its very nature social; society is what we are, trying to better the human race by being a collective society of people.

Now think about how things were before the internet. Even 30 years back in the 60's and 70's before the explosion of the internet. Family's and communities were vastly different than they are today. Neighbors were neighborly, people interacted, and apart from the normal abnormalities, society continued along. People knew each other, towns were social. A great example is my small home town, people know other people in town, and to various degrees information that today we might think is a privacy issue. Not needing ID to cash your check, kids allowed to play unsupervised, and in general a rather peaceful and simple community doing community things.

The Big Community of the Internet

So what changed in the past 30 years that has everyone up in arms about privacy? Well for one, people place a great deal more importance on being private, but why? What makes this time so unique that we can't share our lives with others? Why is our neighbor as strange as the person we never met in some far off land? I don't know, and I bet you don't either. Now comes the internet, somthing that by its definition is a social network of people (after all the internet was created to share information) and all is good, until the public at large gets ahold of it.

But wait, we care so much about our private lives, but yet we post our lives on Facebook and Twitter under the guise that somehow we keep what we post online private some how. Why do we cry out that the internet is such a bad thing for our private lives, but yet you just ordered some nice shoes on Zappos?

The internet clashes with our current societies idea of the private life and threatens to make us... social again.

But is this so bad?

Is it crazy to think that people are social creatures? No, that's what we are. So why do we place so much importance on our own privacy to the detriment of others? Think of what we could accomplish if people didn't worry so much about how private their medical records were, but how that information, when used to aid everyone, could solve so many problems we face today. If everyone worked to a common goal and didn't try to out do their neighbor, but helped them succeed. The internet and the people who "get" it, are working to make the web more like how society should be, and less of how society is, not because we are crazy, but because we know that the web is an extension of the human condition. Somthing we can do that people even 20 years ago couldn't... Bring everyone together.