Society Needs To Change For New Technologies

You can run, but you can't hide!

I'm thinking about this for quite a while now. Today I read a post from Mahendra Palsule about "super-logoff" and "white-walling" (check articles [1],[2] ) on Facebook. I think this is a terrible mistake, and here is why.

Like it or not, tech stuff is evolving very fast. It changes our lives. Has always done. Remember the time without TV? Maybe not. Maybe you will see it in your lifetime. It comes and goes as tech moves forward. The social networks will not last forever, but it will evolve in something other. And it's moving fast. Too fast for our society. We have many problems, and it will get worse.

But how can we protect us from having negative effects from all this stuff? By finding ways to hide our stuff? By obscuring our activity? From being an non-existent when we log off? I don't think so. Now we can try it, but soon, mabye very soon, this isn't possible anymore. As a teen, or if your social accounts are not so important, this might work for now. But this is like, driving a car, and if you come home, you remove your tires from the vehicle in case someone wants to steel it. In addition, we might have to use this or similar services in the future, where you can't simply go out without being isolated. Yeah 20 years ago you couldn't live without a TV in a modern society. In maybe 10-15 years you can't live without your social presence on the web.

Lets use this stressed example: You post your drunken pictures on the web and going to a job-interview. The boss is checking your social activities and say "Nope". Who did wrong here? You for posting the truth that you were young and party on as almost anyone did, or the boss you blame you for things he probably did, too? That's the point of it. We need to go public and change the old remnant of the past. We must get this new thinking, or we will be overwhelmed by the new technologies that WILL come. We can't stop it, even if we wanted to. But we don't want to stop it, because it gives us much more freedom. When it's normal that there might be some weird stuff about you on the internet, than you won't get negative responses from this. People in all classes need to realize, no, to accept, that it is what it is.

Like Jeff Jarvis stressed so often in his articles. Go public! It's your damn right. Time is on your side. You still can hide your secrets. But you can't hide your existence. Welcome to the new world.