I read The Third Wave by Alvin Toffler in 1980 and realized it was true and that computers would be the next revolution. This is what made me major in Computer Science from 1980-82. I bought the second personal Apple computer sold to the public. I heard someone on a show about Steve Jobs on PBS say, “it is the only technology no one has to read a manual to use.” It helps and they should, but people don’t have to to use it. It is very simple.
Steve Jobs envisioned the personal computer, but those who developed the internet saw the privacy problems, the dystopian, possibilities from the very beginning. We had all read 1984. The internet was first used by scientists around the world so they could share their discoveries immediately with each other. It was always created to be an open medium, which makes it inherently susceptible to abuse.
And as smaller and smaller chips came about, the amount of information that could be collected increased. The government has the largest mainframes to store information collected on us and the world, and some companies like FB and Goggle have huge buildings that cover acres to house theirs. There was a lot of discussion in the early days about the need to write laws to protect people’s privacy but it never got done. I think only Sweden at the time had a law that all information collected could be reviewed by the person and could request it be removed from their own files, and also about who could collect information. I doubt if this is true any longer. And they were the only ones.
So the technology developed like a wildfire without the necessary safeguards. It is harder to lobby congress to make laws about privacy rights about a technology few understood at the time, than to create it. And the government has always been a master at recruiting the most promising minds and using technology for the wrong reasons, new weapons, war, controlling us. There were hackers even then trying to warn us.
China is so darn good at spying on its citizens that it wants to share its knowledge with the world, Reuters reports: "A Chinese telecommunications equipment company has sold Iran's largest telecom firm a powerful surveillance system capable of monitoring landline, mobile and internet communications, interviews and contract documents show."
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...
Steve Jobs is called a visionary. I also envisioned the first ebook back in those years, but didn’t know any geeks to build it for me and wasn’t a salesperson to market it. If he was a visionary, then he also saw what I have said above, and I think he did. He just put his energy into making the product and not the end result.
As government, corporations and advertisers took over the internet, the content you saw, and see, has become filtered more and more. That's why people joke about Al Gore inventing the internet, because the government got into the game early on to spread the technology. They understood the power. This is why when you do a search now, the first few pages are ones that are paid for to load at the top, or deliberately placed through manipulation by think tanks and government to be where they are. You have to get through many pages in a search now to get to the unfiltered. This was not true in the beginning of the internet.
Also advertising is all over it. You can’t load a page without it being the major aspect. They even can tell by what you click on now what kind of advertising to put on your page. Laws are now being written, not to protect us, but to protect the government and corporations from us and to give them more control than ever over the technology, while depriving us of any privacy rights. I fear that dystopian society is becoming a reality, and all the things that we love about the internet, we will soon be deprived of, some we already have.
Most people do not have enough understanding about the technology to realize that all this is happening, but they are waking up to it, like the ones being fired or arrested because of what they post on FB or Twitter. And their employers and potential employers and colleges are now demanding their passwords to these accounts. People are now trying to fight back and finding there is no protection for them. What you do on your own time is no longer your own time. Your thoughts are being monitored and suppressed just by these types of invasions. This is why for many years I rarely went on the internet to talk, to be a presence in it. I used it, just not the way others did. I value my freedom more than most people. I do not bank or buy on it. I only went on really in the last year, came out of the closet, because it no longer matters to me, and I wanted to speak out about some things.
Workers fired or disciplined for bad-mouthing employers on social-networking sites are fighting back using a decades-old labor law—a new front in the murky battle over what workers can do and say online.
Since the rise of Facebook and Twitter, companies believed they had the right to fire employees who posted complaints or hostile or rude comments online about their employers.
But in recent months, workers have sought to solve their very modern employment predicament by using the law that kick-started the U.S. labor movement: the National Labor Relations Act of 1935. The law gives private-sector employees certain rights to complain about pay, safety and other working conditions. It doesn't protect simple griping.
Should employers and colleges have the right to monitor and decide what you say on line? Is this not a form of thought control?
But, one of the other major problems with the whole technology is the overload of information. People cannot sift information critically with such a vast amount available. This has also become a real concern. We are too willing to believe anything we read on the internet. We do not understand enough about source origination to know what is bullshit. Most people use the internet for entertainment, not a search for knowledge and information. A technology that started out as a great tool for writers, creative people,mathematicians and scientists has turned into a powerful medium to distract, manipulate, track and control us. Most of it now is a lot of crap.
The Marine Corps on Wednesday notified a sergeant who has been openly critical of President Barack Obama that he is violating Pentagon policy barring troops from political activities and that he faces dismissal.
Camp Pendleton Marine Sgt. Gary Stein started a Facebook page called Armed Forces Tea Party to encourage fellow service members to exercise their free speech rights. He declared a few weeks ago that he would not follow the unlawful orders of the commander in chief. Stein also criticized Defense Secretary Leon Panetta for his comments on Syria.
Stein, a nine-year member of the Corps, said he did nothing wrong and planned to fight the charges. He had applied to extend his service, which was set to expire in a few months.
"I'm completely shocked that this is happening," he said. "I've done nothing wrong. I've only stated what our oath states that I will defend the constitution and that I will not follow unlawful orders. If that's a crime, what is America coming to?"
http://news.yahoo.com/...
I personally don't agree with Stein's opinions, and they could be illegal, which many people also are unaware of when they go on line. But, since they are on the internet they are now no longer his private opinions, and he can be prosecuted for expressing them where the government and others can read them. If he had kept them to his friends who agree with him or himself, that would not be true.
Maybe, part of the problem has been one of education, what free speech rights you do have and how to find good information in a sea of junk. Another, has been the fact that sufficent laws weren’t put in place as the technology developed to protect our rights, especially on information gathering. It’s hard to do after the fact, and the laws are being created in the opposite direction, not for personal users, but for government and corporations. It will be a continual struggle to keep new laws restricting content from being created and to make some protecting the rights of private users. The battle has already been lost in many areas, because it was never waged from the beginning.