I’ve been online now for just over 5 years. Recently I accidentally found the first video I made of myself, where I self-consciously wondered whether the information broadcasting movement I was about to join had any relevance, or whether it was a half-witted attempt to engage in broader but seemingly disconnected discourses, as half-witted as the information selected for the Voyager time capsule meant for both future generations and extraterrestrials, now spinning around in outer space.
No, I am not going to share it. Too much information.
My blog is again disconnected. I’ve effectively shut down the communication overload that was making me spend more time than I could afford or than was good for me on the internet. Other bloggers are doing similar things it seems, as many networks with their own channels have formed. Facebook is the new general watering hole, and that too will need reducing. Facebook is scary. And that’s me saying it, someone who has shared domestic scenes and childhood memories on her professional blog. It’s the interconnectedness of everything that is so disturbing. It costs the wrong kind of time to keep up, and makes finding things so easy for the wrong kind of people.
I just watched the film on the Anonymous movement and am really somewhat taken aback by the extreme change in attitude that seems to have developed not only among hackers, but among many young people in general that the public has the right to know pretty much anything at any time, certainly about people with any kind of social or economic or political power. It used to be that you had to understand history to understand the now in perspective. I studied history for that reason. Today, history is history. Recently, the loud and pervasive advice to normal people who venture online is: forget privacy, you’ve long lost it. So it seems the only protection against privacy invasion is not to be interesting.
For everyone else, privacy is the new taboo.
Links about Anonymous:
- 4chan: image-based public bulletin board for comments and images
- Wikipedia re Denial of Service attack
- Wikipedia re Project Chanology, protest movement vs Scientology by members of Anonymous, Jan 2008
- Wired: Operation Titstorm against the Australian Gvt blocking internet sites, Oct 2010
- Wikipedia re Arab Spring/ Social media
- Blog FAQs by Jennifer Emick, former Anonymous
- Salon: Anon attacks Aaron Barr, cyberstrategist
- Glenn Greenwald, journalist, Salon now Guardian
- Wikipedia re LuluzSec
- Wikipedia re Bradley Manning, gvt leaks
- Wikipedia re Operation Payback