The Internet: Are We Too Connected?
The Internet is a wonderful tool we can find out information in seconds that used to take hours of perusing through books at the library. We can meet people on the other side of the globe but are we too connected?
My concern is the fact that Google, Facebook, YouTube, Yahoo and other networks want you to connect together so everyone knows what you are doing; the videos you watch, the places you log onto and the people you talk to.
Some of us might not want everyone knowing our every move. I don’t mean to sound like a paranoid person worried Big Brother will know too much of my business but lets look at the possibilities here.
Say you like to watch pornography and Google connects you to your church Yahoo site. Do you want the parishioners to know what you do in your spare time?
Facebook wants to connect all our shopping, research and other social networking sites together. Personally, I don’t want my family knowing what catalogs I’ve shopped or what purchases I’ve made in case it is for a gift.
I haven’t even touched on potential employers. Now it’s as though they have a window into our home watching every move we make, every show we watch and every person we interact with.
Our game systems are connected, sites like Netflix has our televisions connected and even our cell phones are connected.
Creative people are often a bit on the unusual side and I’m not sure I want a future employer or business contact knowing every friend I have and judging me by my erotica author acquaintances.
If you think being self-employed or a freelance author saves you from worrying about this, think again. Negative publicity works in some fields but not in most.
Then there are our kids. Connecting everyone includes our children we have friended on facebook to keep an eye on because lets face it the web isn’t as secure as we’d like it to be and we have to make sure that guy who says he is a teenager isn’t really a forty year old pedophile.
Just wondering if I’m the only one who thinks being overly connected isn’t a good thing.