My main focus will be on the sinister side of Facebook: namely, the fact that thousands upon thousands of high school and college students are posting practically of their lives, oblivious or dimly aware of the fact that all of their personal information is not only being stored for an indefinite period of time, even after it is ‘deleted,’ but that this information is being sold to future employers, the government, anyone really. I have already found several websites complaining about this phenomenon:

http://stellastarguitar.blogspot.com/2008/01/why-im-leaving-facebook.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/jan/14/facebook
http://www.collegerecruiter.com/weblog/2006/09/employers_using.php?/>

I will of course find much more information on this. I’m working on a way to tie it into our textbook readings, but nothing we’ve read so far seems to fit, so I will flip through and find an appropriate essay.
Although I had heard that employers might check my Facebook, I, along with countless others, was not aware that the so-called “privacy settings” offer us a complete false sense of security: Facebook is a company, ergo primarily concerned with promoting brand names and selling our profiles for money. It is Big Brother thinly disguised as “social networking,” and the brunt of my project will be explaining to the class just how private/public their information truly is.

marriedtothesea.com

Awww…this was our last reading. This was the last article in the book. That is so bittersweet.
:’-(
I got way, wayyy more out of this class than I ever imagined I would. “From Memex to Youtube”? No lie! I thought we’d merely talk about how Youtube reflects the degradation vs. value of pop culture. But this has been amazing!
~

On to the topic at hand. Today’s article. By a small army: Tim Berners-Lee, Robert Cailliau, Ari Luotonen, Henrik Frystyk Nielson, and Arthur Secret….I wish my name were “Arthur Secret.” (If I’m ever in need of a nom de plume…I’ll keep it in mind.)

Oh but seriously back to the article, “The World Wide Web.” It trips me out to see the authors try to explain the WWW to a reader they assume is unfamiliar with it:
“When is starts, it displays an object, normally a document with text and possibly images. Some of the phrases are highlightd: in blue, boxed, or perhaps numbered.”
Describing it at such a rudimentary level gave me pause. I mean I guess that’s how I would describe the internet. It makes the familiar strange, (to bite off a term from anthropology). Although the internet is a really new phenomenon, I really can’t imagine going through college without google, email, etc. Oy- email! Invaluable, that. But it is fascinating how such a…weird thing…became SO fundamental in our lives, and so quickly.

As many of my classmates have pointed out already, Sherry Turkle brings up many apparent pros of videogames that I had never given any credit to. The idea of videogames as meditation, control, mental cleansing, etc., all seemed plausible. Ok, kind of. Somehow to my mind, it was ok when the disabled boy played videogames so he could forget his body’s imprefections. However, the part about the man who must stop by the arcade for 1-2 hours before coming home really seemed strange.

When I’m at work it’s not really my picture. When I get home it is my picture again. And after I play I can go back and share me. So, sometimes the games are a preparation for getting out and being aggressive in the rest of my life, and sometimes they are there for, um, getting bck into my own video game.

I mean at least he isn’t having an affair right? Haha. I could be wrong, but if my hypothetical husband was coming home late every night, and giving me that bizarre spiel, I would sort of take it as a sin of mental weakness, honestly. Why can’t you unwind by listening to the radio in the car on the way home like normal people? I feel like this man, along with the kids in the story, talk about video games as a kind of opiate almost. It just sets off red flags when people become so consumed with anything, claiming they NEED it.

(The topic of this blog began as a mere comment on Kira’s blog, until it grew so long I decided to make it its own post…)

I could see why a reader would draw a connection between “Immigrant” and Kipling’s “The White Man’s Burden” but I was pretty confused about whether my classmates agreed or disagreed with the motivations of Kipling/ the Kimonians.

You all realize that Kipling never lived that derogatory little poem down, right? (We just read it for 382. ) Colonialism= not cool. Racism= not cool. White people THOUGHT they were improving the so-called primitive peoples, but in reality they were degrading the people and wrecking their civilizations. In fact…no. I won’t even give us that much credit- maybe in the beginning the whites/kimonians TOLD themselves they were helping uplift an “inferior” race, but in reality, they thought that even the “best savages” could never achieve their own level of civilization. The whites derived a sadistic, self-rightous pleasure out of their interractions with the natives, much as the narrator of this story felt that he was being taunted (albeit in a more subtle way) by his host family.

I guess we’d have to come to an agreement about whether the Kimoans really want to uplift the human race, or not. Is this colonialism? The only parallel I can remark upon with certainty is the weird phenomenon of people courting their own captivity. The colonized natives, after internalizing the inferiority projected upon them by the british, etc., they sought not to rebel against their oppressors, but to emmulate them- to become “more British than the British.” (I’m wishing I hadn’t sold back

Heart of Darkness

right now)

Anyway I think the fact that all of the humans on Kimon eventually desire to be playmates has many parallels to real life, not just in regards to colonialism. The way kids jump through hoops of fire to get into so-called Ivy League undergrad universities, so that they can be surrounded by greatness apparently, but in reality be taught by a TA and be at the bottom of their class. but it still sounds good when they write home. Or just switch on TV? People on reality tv shows are putting themselves through all manner of humiliations in order to be the “best.” But what are they winning? Can the prize replace the dignity that you lost in the process? Hmm. Did you know Donald Trump wants Spitzer’s call girl to be on his tv show?

People love subjugation and would eat it with a spoon if they would.