"In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes." Andy Warhol

            Let’s take a quick look at blogging and what it offers. It can be seen as a one-to-many medium which means (hopefully) that one clear point of view can be represented and then discussed. It can be seen as a more efficient way of communication compared with a many-to-many medium. On such a discussion board information can be unreliable, and that’s after spending ages trying to find the relavant information.

            I think that blogging offers a space where private people can come together as a group to discuss anything from societal problems, politics, or even just swap recipes. As a platform for these discussions it can be seen as a new ‘public sphere’. The term was coined by German philosopher Jürgen Habermas who’s work focused on the way people like to come together to peruse ‘rational’ and common interests. Blogging and social networks have a great potential to be a non-discriminatory and non-judgemental way to present ideas and interests. It’s easily accessible, inclusive, and designed in a way that makes it easy for readers to get involved.

However these types of social networks do come with their own problems. They can quite easily become addictive, as some people find it easier to take on an online persona. Some may obsess over it as a new form of entertainment. Through updates you can find out what your peers are doing, and in some instances seems to create a kind of social competition. For example your updates have to be wittier than everyone else’s, or the party you’re throwing has to be bigger and better than anyone else’s. Networked societies can also make some people very selective as to which type of public personas they choose to associate with.

Others take the view that these networks can be an invasion of privacy. A socially engineered way of keeping everyone under surveillance. It is known that the internet its self is a civilian ‘spin off’ of military technology. The military spend large amounts publicly funded money reaching and developing technology, and what works well spills over into the public sector and industry. Some can argue that the funds would be better spent if directly given to the public sector and industry, and cut the military out of the equation directly.

 Are these select few people being paranoid? If you take a look at these links which will show you companies selling software to help you spy on your kids/employees/ spouses via their web cams and smartphones they may have a point

1. http://www.internetsafetysoftware.com/icanseeyou/ 
2. http://www.mobile-spy.com/

Personally I used to think so what if people see my CV or somehow find my phone number online. ‘Rational’ and ‘normal’ people wouldn’t need this information for any purpose and so wouldn’t use it, but perhaps I should be a little paranoid.