I’m finally back after a 6 month hiatus from blogging and I want to start by addressing a very nagging question but I’ll get to that in just a moment. No doubt you’ve experienced social networking in one form or another (Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, LinkedIn, Twitter etc etc), and if you haven’t you’d better quit living in the 90’s. It’s all about creating and sharing information with friends, colleagues and basically everyone. The last 3 years especially have been witness to an explosive growth in the size and influence of these social networks. “Individuals finally have the power” - wow! (btw, that wow is supposed to be sarcastic).
The proliferation of social networks has led to a new fad… Data Portability. Data Portability is the ability to share information across multiple interfaces and web platforms using open standards. Once the data is accessed, it can repackaged, remixed, right-clicked… you name it. Basically your Facebook profile content for instance could appear on other social sites, and the flickr photos from your phone in return could appear on a google map. The basic idea is to mash together the infinite amounts of shared data (cue the scrolling Matrix code) and attempt make sense of it.
My nagging question is - does it all end? Mashing all this information together has led to an avalanche (more like a storm) of information that we have to deal with daily. For instance a news item can be mashed together with related YouTube links, google maps, flickr photos, message boards, stock ticker information, blogs and what your friends on Twitter think… the list is endless. By the time you’re done reading you’ll know all there is to know about Myanmar.
I have two problems; First can the human mind deal with the coming onslaught of information? Secondly, where does privacy begin and end, or should we just give it up altogether? Personally, I’m afraid that a super machine in the very near future will have the ability to assimilate together all this information, decipher it and draw very precise social patterns for every individual.
