Privacy, Where are the Boundaries?

So, as I've been working on researching my final I've gotten more and more immersed into the questions of online privacy regulation and the boundaries involved in it. It’s an interesting tangle little mess that is for the most part intangible.

That’s what I find so fascinating about it though, the intangibility of it. And I find it both interesting yet not surprising that the intangibility is what is causing the grief as far as the technological information spectrum is concerned.

It starts at a national issue at first. Information or files are hard to regulate between people when there are discrepancies in laws for information being spread between tangible things (such as books or DVDs) and just the files in their pure online form. Most of the laws in the US for example don’t actually cover the transmitted information but do cover processed and distributed versions. This leads to gray areas and loopholes for sharing information in unsanctioned formats. Then there are issues where the information spread goes around and crosses jurisdictions. Since the laws aren’t broadly spread across lines of jurisdiction more troubles come into play.

One of the biggest issues that I’ve notice though are international privacy rules. You have places that have regulated privacy laws for electronic files and the information can be safe there. Unfortunately, there are countries that are regarded as safe havens, which are deliberately free of those privacy laws. This comes to be an issue when information from the secure, regulated national systems gets sent over to the safe havens and loses the protection it once had.

Honestly, internet privacy is something that just bounces around in my head like no other and I run into places where there is so much ambiguity that I just have to stop and reset myself before continuing. I believe that the only way to really have privacy on the Internet is to have a global system. Unfortunately with conflicting government goals this vision will never reach fruition and I feel like a lot of privacy efforts will be done in vain.

No recent activity...

When I open up the Internet there’s always one thing that I do; I go to Facebook. It’s nothing that I ever think about either, it just happens. It can be quite a bothersome thing though because when I need to get work done and I have to go online, at times I will get distracted for hours on end just perusing the many pages of Facebook’s domain. It is at the same time a Procrastinator’s best friend and worst enemy.

To my dismay, we were given the task in class to not use Facebook for a week. It hasn’t even been an entire week and I hate this assignment. I had to disable my phone from getting Facebook updates so that the little notifications wouldn’t taunt me with recent activity. When I was through with that I said my farewells and signed off.

Naturally, my mind needed something else to idle itself with. So like a child to a shiny object I let my hands wander across the keyboard typing in “tumblr.com” and “twitter.com.” If I could not post to Facebook I would post somewhere else to get the social stimulation I craved.

Reading back on this I sound like a drug addict with regards to Facebook, and I find this both amusing and sad. In a way Facebook is an addiction I suppose. I’ve tried to “quit it” before and deactivate my profile for a period of time, but I’ve always found myself wandering back within a few days.

Though, in a way it makes sense that it’s so difficult to quit. See, Facebook has a trick that helps to ensure its users wander back to it eventually. It doesn’t really allow you to delete your profile. Instead it merely gives you the option of “deactivating” it and all you must do to get it back is login with your old information. That means you don’t lose any of your old information on there so users are more likely to be willing to return after they’ve deactivated it because it doesn’t take time to set everything back to your preferences, information, friends, etc.

I feel like a hypocrite in a way pointing out the lows of the social leviathan and still using it, but it is a useful site. For instance, I can’t wait to get back online and have easier access to the people back home that I don’t get to see down in Texas.

Alas, for now I wait.

And the words go on and on

Doing one thing uninterrupted for a prolonged period of time can be a difficult task. Personally, I have never really been able to do much of anything uninterrupted, regardless of the activity. On occasion I have been completely invested in an art project that I have allowed to just envelop my every action; but because of the intensity of my focus those projects haven’t lasted too terribly long. Anything that takes too long generally loses my interest anyways as I am always trying to find new mind-stimulating activities. So, when I was faced with the assignment in my ATEC 2322 class of reading uninterrupted for 40 minutes I shuddered at the sheer thought. It’s not that I haven’t been able to do that before, in fact on numerous occasions I have been so intoxicated by a good read that I wouldn’t put it down for hours upon hours on end, but it’s really difficult for me to just fall into something like that. Part of it is that the initial attempt to read is something that I always drag my mental heels through. The other part of it is that if I’m going in with an end in sight it is the only thing I can focus on. Unfortunately, I could do nothing to prevent these two blocks from occurring.

                When I began my assignment I looked at the clock to check my time and penciled down that I was allowed to stop reading at 9:56. That was bad choice number one. All I could do throughout my reading was to check the clock to see if time was up yet. Unfortunately the troubles began before that as even before the start of my reading assignment I must confess that I made a stupid choice of reading. I decided that I was going to read In Cold Blood. Now, this isn’t a bad read, in fact it was something I enjoyed, but I had read it before. This meant that the entire time I had even more reason to focus on the clock because none of the information I was reading was new information and therefore not mind stimulating. By the end of it I was honestly just excited to open up my computer and check out what was going on online.

                I feel like that’s how a lot of people today would react, and I’m not really advocating it. Honestly, I wish I could just do simple things like read without the technological word invading my life, but that’s the world we live in today. Hopefully I’ll be able to find something else that can anchor me into the real world and not dwell so much on internet world.

I can tell that we are gonna be friends...

I’d like to ask you a simple question: how many friends do you have? Well, at first glance it seems simple, but in reality it’s not that clear to get an answer, especially when you add in the social networking machine that is Facebook. Think about it, many people have friends on Facebook that they hardly know, and some people have friends that they haven’t even met and don’t have any mutual friends with. I didn’t think I’d be able to say this, but now that I’ve taken a second to think about what I’ve just stated I’m embarrassed to say I fit into both of those categories.

            Facebook is very curious in that aspect, for some reason people we would never say were our friends in real life are our friends in Facebook life. Sometimes I’ll just be browsing, okay the more appropriate term may be creeping, through pages and I’ll notice I have a Facebook “friend” I forgot about and think to myself “why on Earth am I friends with this person? I don’t even like them.”

In fact though, the word creeping brought me to a point that works with this whole friendship thing. The point is that even though I question why I’m friends with them in respect to the fact that I don’t even like the person it’s an irrelevant thought. Facebook friending doesn’t really mean being friends, it means giving someone the right to creep through your life. Most of the activity that goes through friendships on Facebook isn’t seen. Most of the activity done is merely observation. In fact, so much of Facebook is comprised of creeping that it’s not uncommon to hear people go on about gossip and utter the words “I saw it on Facebook.” That’s where the lines between real life friendship and Facebook friendship start to blur, and when you get there it’s quite a mess.

Maybe we’ll never know completely who’s a “real” friend and who’s a Facebook friend, but with real life and Internet life meshing into one it’s getting a lot harder to say that it will ever be completely possible to distinguish.  But I’ll leave this thought for later, I’m going to go update my status.

Wiki wiki pedia pedia

So, while perusing the wondrous domain that is the online community of encyclopedic knowledge that is Wikipedia I decided to edit the pick-up line page. Clearly this was of the utmost importance to the academic community and so I proudly took the initiative to update the world about pick-up line information that may not have been known to previous Wikipedia readers. So, as I got to the page I dutifully clicked on the link to edit the article and purposefully scribed a subsection that was glaringly missing from the article: Harry Potter pick-up lines.

Okay, so maybe not everybody cares about Harry Potter pick-up lines (even though I believe that they should), but our class assignment was to edit a Wikipedia article and seeing as that I had looked up Harry Potter pick-up lines instead of studying for my government exam the day before (which I aced by the way, feel free to short me dirty looks for that) it was a topic I knew I could contribute to. It was pretty simple adding in my own subsection, though admittedly I did look up formatting information; but considering I’ve never edited a Wikipedia article before it was very user friendly. I suppose that’s both a good and a bad thing. The good part is that since it’s user-friendly people who know a topic well can easily input information that can aid people who know little to nothing about said topic. The bad part is that since it’s user-friendly people who don’t know a topic well can easily input information that can hurt people who know little to nothing about said topic.

The bad side being said though, I hear that Wikipedia has a pretty good system set-up getting rid of incorrect or irrelevant information. I know first-hand that my old high school computers were blocked from editing articles because too many false reports were added from the computer. Also, upsettingly I found a few days later that my addition to pick-up lines had been removed. I assume it was because of the irrelevance of the information on the larger scheme of things. So Wikipedia does have some safety in the validity of its information.

So Wikipedia has its good and its bad, and I suppose it’s up to each user whether they will trust its information or not, but I for one will continue to use it as a jumping off block until I get deeper into the topic I’m researching.

Micro-blogging

So I’ve been thinking about social media, and in particular I think I’ll target blogging. It seems appropriate seeming as this is a blog itself. Now, for a while I’ve kept up my own personal tumblr, which is a site designed for micro-blogging. This is for me the best method of blogging. I’ve had to create personal blogs for other classes throughout my high school career and currently I have two that I have to keep up for my college courses, but those have never seemed to stick for me. It’s not that sites for true blogs are too terribly confusing, but I much prefer the simplicity of sites like tumblr. When you log in it’s nice because you are directed to your dashboard page which updates consistently with new posts from people who you’re following as well as giving you alerts to if a person made some sort of note on your posts. In a way it’s kind of like the twitter interface, only in my opinion much less confusing (plus you don’t have that annoying symbol limit that comes with tweets). I find myself going to my tumblr a lot more often than anything else (other than the addiction that is facebook) simply because I have a good deal of freedom with it while paired with the simplicity. Also, I can control how much I want to write still. The beauty of the set up is that it doesn’t look too weird to have a long post stuck in with some other short posts, pictures, videos, or audio clips. I overall find it very user friendly and would suggest others to try it out. The only issue is that you might find yourself more focused on your tumblr than on your blog.

What and How?

So I kind of  messed up and did this week's post last week, so I'm going to do last week's post this week. Nifty how that works out, eh?

I'm going to discuss the Martin McLuhan piece. Quite frankly one of the more interesting yet mind-boggling articles we have read in this class. I really enjoyed the discussion of how all media actually works through another form of medium. However, at the same time it is such a jumbled portrayal of these ideas that it could be at times nearly incomprehensible. Honestly, it inevitably goes into the whole situation/institution of slavery and it just gets rather upsetting. Why does everything that would be so simple and lovely change into something that’s so dismal in comparison? Why does the simplest ideas get transformed into the most convoluted, destructed concepts? Even know everything I set out to do in this post has been twisted and turned into this mass of confusion. Perhaps this is a perfect representation of the article in my own way. But, perhaps not.