Perhaps I'm just not cut out for the future, because I really like my privacy.

I can see why businesses and self-important attention whores would want to tag their sites or blogs for others to find and read them, but why would the average person want such a thing? I like my privacy, or at least the illusion that I have of it (as in, what I don't know they know about me can't bother me), so the idea of someone being able to search for something I've thought, written, or posted to the Internet really creeps me out. That's part of why I don't use my real name on myspace and why I keep my privacy settings the way they are on Facebook.

I actually searched on Technorati for the common tag I've given my "20 Things" entries--and I got several hits from my own blog! I couldn't believe it. I felt so violated. (Which I realize is dumb, because anytime you put anything onto this vast web it becomes public by default... but still. I didn't tell Technorati that I wanted it to find me. I was using my tags for my own benefit, so I could organize my blog and view just library assignments when necessary.)

Over the holidays I reconnected with an old friend who became a Master of Entertainment Technology in 2006 and now works as a programmer for a government contractor outside of DC. He was talking about "Web 2.0" and the hundred-dollar laptop (which he bought so he could hack and create new software and give it away for free) and the chumby, which one of his friends helped develop, and also about the future of the world with free Internet access everywhere for everyone. We went out with another friend of his who has an iPhone, and Charlie said he was planning to get one himself because he had created some sort of widget with Flickr and embedded it in his blog to provide instantaneous feeding updates. He explained how, with an iPhone, he could take a photo of me while we were having coffee and then update his blog with "Having coffee with Devon," and the picture he had taken would automatically appear with the post. To me, that makes the Internet too immediate.

I also recently had a conversation with an English teacher at my old high school, a gentleman whose tenure at the school was interrupted for six years, spanning the four during which I attended, and so whose official acquaintance I had never really made before yesterday, and who also happens to be the alumni coordinator for the school. We were talking about the quality and character of the students--he wondering if I thought it had changed, and I elaborating on how disturbing it was to walk into a classroom and find three students using their personal laptops without asking permission or if anyone minded--and eventually got onto the topic of the future of technology. He has set up a Facebook account for himself to help track alumni, and he asked if I could show him a few features on the site, since I knew my way around it better. Somehow we got onto the issue of photos, and I showed him the "untag" feature on Facebook, which he had not previously known about. After untagging himself in a particularly unflattering picture, he made the offhand comment, "Of course, this will only be help until they market the technology to run facial recognition on all public photos." When I looked at him like he was crazy, he explained, "I have a very paranoid friend who's into government conspiracies and cover-ups and all that. He also believes that, one day, as soon as a digital photograph is taken, it will transmit the data to a satellite so that if there were, say, hit-and-run out on Leigh and Lombardy, the authorities could search satellite hits to see if anyone happened to be taking a picture at the time of the accident." And though I know it's possible, the idea blew my mind. I'm just hoping I'll be dead before all of that starts to happen.

But now for the exercise:
1. I assume that individual blog post search results are returned under "Posts" tab, and that blogs in the "Blog Directory" are found under the "Blogs" tab... but I can't figure out a way just to search for tags. Guess I'm just stupid like that. Maybe the Internet is not for me. I got about 3000 returns under "Posts" and only about 1000 under "Blogs." You know, my friend Finale is an engineering PhD candidate at Trinity/Cambridge right now, having graduated from MIT some years ago, and she works a lot with AI. She was able to come home briefly after coming back stateside for a conference in Florida, and we got together this past weekend. There was a time, she said, when she used to get excited about technology and new advancements and whenever a friend was able to hack a new device and manipulate the software to improve it, but now that she does that all the time as part of her job, it's not fun anymore. She has been inundated with technology--with all of its massive leaps and exponential bounds in the last few years--and it just isn't the same. That's sort of the way I feel with the "Web 2.0" phenomenon, I guess. Parts of it are cool, and then the rest is just... too much, too fast. Seriously, it's not even very fun to be on the Internet any more--not with everyone spying and watching your every move, all in the name of community. I had a theory several years ago--long before everyone over the age of nine had a cell phone and laptop--that our humanity peaked around the Industrial Revolution, and we've been on a rapid downhill course since then towards destruction. Think about the boom of technology that happened in the twentieth century alone: the first viable aircraft in 1903, stealth planes by 1989; the first commercial electronic calculator in 1961, the first graphing one in 1985 (and now a standard requirement for any high school math class); the first commercial televisions in the 1930s, and flat-screen HDTVs within seventy years; computers the sizes of full rooms in the 1950s, the IMB PC in 1981, and the BlackBerry introduced in 1999. It's frightening to realize how far we've come in such a short time when you consider that mankind has been around for hundreds of thousands of years. And consider the "progress" we've made in this new century: iPhones, 2G flash drives the size of an eraser, HDTV becoming standard broadcasting by 2009--that cathode ray tube TV you bought two years ago won't pick up anything at all with that ol' antenna anymore! And look at this invasion of privacy that everyone encourages and watches (exhibitionist reality TV is an entirely separate beast!), now picking up momentum on the Internet. We're all snowballs in an avalanche, folks. Hope you're ready for the crash at the end of the slope.

2. I explored some of the "popular" things. I should make it known that I've never read Harry Potter or The Da Vinci Code for the very reason that they were "popular." I typically avoid "popular" things. These are pretty much no exception. None of them were very interesting. Most of them were technology sites. And you know how hot the prospect of new technology gets me...


3. Ta-da!


Look, I'm sorry to be so negative all the time. Really, I am. I'm not against new things; I'm not against learning. There are just some things that I don't like giving up--like my right to privacy (which I know isn't really guaranteed anywhere). I am a private citizen in this country, and I expect to be afforded some privileges as such. I'm not a convicted criminal, I'm not even a suspected criminal, and so my own honest privacy should be something I can be trusted to maintain until such a time as I no longer spend my life as a decent, law-abiding citizen. To everyone on the Internet right now: stop caring about what everyone around you is thinking and doing! You guys are the collective Gladys Kravitz of the twenty-first century! And I refuse to play into those manicured hands of yours!