I am sure you have heard about the phrase “Big Brother is watching you”, and maybe read “Nineteen Eighty-Four” by George Orwell. But how many of you, realized that we are the very civilization Orewell describes in his novel which is completely kept under surveillance. Well it may sound bit harsh for now, but that day seems to be not that far away.
We live in the information era where we need to understand, that measurement of power is defined by the amount of knowledge and information we possess. We start our day, by checking our mails before we brush our teeth (Yeah that’s me, and I know few more like me 😛 ). We tweet about what we do, what we read, what we hear tagged with our location using geo-tagging. What ever we hear that we do not know, or if we are curious about something (maybe, Paris Hilton’s Sex Tape or about government corruption) we simply google. and as social beings, rather than hanging out with few friends on a Friday night, we comment and gossip around in facebook. So by doing all this we gather information about others, about things and knowledge about new development. As the result we become strong and well connected and that’s the beauty of it.
But the bigger picture is quite scary. Even how strong we become with information and knowledge there will always a stronger person, who will know all about you, from the day you started gathering information and that is the reality of the information age. There will always be a “big brother” who is watching you.
The funny thing is, at present the internet space is full of “big brothers”. Every e-business is trying to know about you and me and graph our social connections. However we should also understand that “Nothing in Life is Free”, nor service is a charity. Google provide us with search results and they make money out of advertising on us. facebook and twitter are the same and now they are at war (With facebook like, connect pushing out to the entire web) simply to own our activities on the web. Whoever wins, each one of them possess great power with regard to information they own. I think this is where we can say “Great power comes with great responsibility” and be blind about the facts.
In my opinion, going back to the stone age is not the answer. as member of the information society we should be aware of our rights, we should read the privacy statement of the e-Business we consume and one of my colleagues said today, “if you are planing to be the next president of the state, do not build up a facebook profile with all your most personal details, it might backfire” 😀
@nuwanbando 