Some of us are old enough to remember 1984, a year that I faced with trepidation. Would I, the nation and the planet get through it or would the Orwellian monsters I had read about, led by Big Brother, seize and bind us to a world of dystopian totalitarianism where every move, action, thought and indiscretion was monitored and controlled by the state? …’Put down on your permanent record’ as they use to say. 1984 came and went, uneventfully. We didn’t jump the shark. But then around 1992, Tim Berners-Lee set off a chain reaction with the creation the World Wide Web. And, the world did exactly that. It self-assembled into a web of connections, to the point where anyone with a computer or computer-like device has instant access to the totality of man’s knowledge and where anyone can upload a video, a text, a picture for the world to see. In fact we have the ability to put our entire lives online and that is where the law of unintended consequences starts to kick in.
When Amazon came on line I thought, how cute, a bunch of lesbians decided to open up an on-line book store. Then came the search engines: AltaVista, Yahoo, Infoseek, and, the Leviathan, Google. Followed by: MySpace, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter. Meanwhile the prices of computers and cell-phones plummeted. Today only Luddites don’t have cell-phones and/or computers, both able to access the Internet and both with WI-FI. We still don’t have HAL (thank God!), but we do have the 2001 Newsreader; it’s called the iPad and cleverest of all was the insertion of a camera into a cellphone –can you say, Dick Tracy. Everyone now is a photo-journalist. That drunken teen party you gave while your parents were away, tagged and posted on Facebook. Oh look, there’s your fraternity hazing online in Hi-Def on Facebook. Is that you standing next to someone smoking weed at party? Hmmm, the Facebook tag's got your name on it? You thought it was fun when you join that right-wing, left-wing, anarchist group in college and posted all your demonstrations on YouTube and notified your friends on Facebook. You thought you were smart when you turned on Facebook’s Personal Locator; now you’re in divorce court and your wife’s lawyer has got a record of the date, time, location and duration of every massage parlor and hotel you visited while engaging in your infidelities. In fact, if any of your liaisons had their Facebook Locator turned on, they can tie you directly to that person. Never put anything on the Internet that you don’t want the whole world to see.
Facebook and all these other Internet enablers have immeasurably improved humanity’s ability to communicate but they have a dark side. They are like the Terminator: They never forget and they never stop. Soon we will be able to record and upload every second of our lives. When you go for a job interview, a bank loan, or apply for an apartment, you, your family and your friends will be FaceBooked and Googled and then judged on that information. The question you have to ask is will their on-line voyeurism diminish their humanity? How will you be weighed in the balance? Will they,
will we become our own ‘Big Brothers’?
will we become our own ‘Big Brothers’?
All Hail Big Brother. He is us!
