I Blag, Therefore I am.

I was thinking today about the whole idea of an online presence and what impact it has had on not only my own life but others as well. It is really something new and very much unprecedented in human history. We have, for the first time, the ability to present ourselves as we want to million, or perhaps billions of ppl with little effort. Everyone is a potential celebrity, and nothing is private.

I myself have been online in some form or another for at least 20 years. It began when I was around fourteen with Compuserve. It grew from that to BBS’, then to usenet, website, and now to all sorts of social networking and personal projects. But this is not so much about my progression as is the progression of people as a whole.

For myself I now have a flickr account, this blag, and a good reads account. I am on multiply, and facebook, but not myspace. I twitter (though not locations I am going to be), and I have just started using last.fm.

It really is no surprise that the largest single usage of the internet revolves around social activities. Humans are, after all, social creatures. But the main question I have here is how much is too much? It’s become expected that a person will have an email address at the least now. But I see people, young and old, putting up information that is rather scary in the implications. I have to wonder if the reality of being online the fact that it is just as real and affects their lives is understood.

We have the worst case - the teenager who killed themself after a myspace prank went bad. But we also have the good stuff, various amazing and interesting blogs. The catharsis of revelation that is postsecret. The ability to connect to people, to find the ones we may have never found otherwise. But, what does it say about us? Our need to publish our lives, to forsake our privacy for some kind of validation? For some attention, or to just say “here I am. I exist.”

As an exercise, try googling yourself. You can find some interesting results. Some of them surprising perhaps. Where is this leading? Will we one day surrender all of our privacy for some online validation to show something off? We have as a whole surrendered a lot of our privacy. Where will is lead? Will we one day become required to publish information? Will our very existence be proven only by being found on google? If we don’t have a blog will we be looked down on?

It is not all doom and gloom though. There are groups like the EFF trying to fight to make sure our rights are not trampled on in regards to privacy, and digital rights.