I detest the fact that large amounts of information about our personal lives, about typecasts, about everything is recorded by a computer or camera in nearly all activities. I would love to completely unplug. However, the catch is that I wouldn't be able to be part of the wonderful typosphere. I have already limited e-mail use to company e-mail. I no longer use Facebook (or anything of the sort) and I no longer own a cell phone. Now, I realize that my call records from my landline at home can be traced and used. But if I choose to walk outside and go somewhere, thereby making myself unable to be reached, there is no record of it unless I go to a place that has a surveillance camera, which is most places. I realize my bank account can be scrutinized and that information has been available about private matters long before the internet. I feel like non-internet related things would require work for an actual person to access, while internet-related activity is monitored by a dumb non-human gadget constantly.
I realize it wouldn't be rational to completely unplug, not if I want to find out about things like typewriters, but I HATE the amount of surveillance that exists these days. And like you said, if Stephen King thinks it's creepy, boy, watch out. I suppose the moderate thing to do is to think very carefully about information gets posted/sent through electronic means.
(Sorry for the longwindedness. This is a subject that I think about often and get just a tad bit passionate about.)
I heard that story - it is a worrisome trend, to be sure. It's all "opt-out" rather than "in" these days. I wonder if the kindle for pc does the same thing. I mean, for the price of the kindle I can get like a dozen typewriters!
This worries me - I used to think that typecast images/scans were largely off-grid in a sense because the googlebots of the world couldn't 'read' their content. But it makes sense that they'd use OCR technology on these images as well. Which means the only things that aren't scanned/assimilated/categorised/monitored are... letters, private conversations etc.
Which means our world is getting more and more like a Philip K Dick world every day; and we largely don't care about it.
Not long ago there was a lot of stink about facebook and privacy, but I think people are simply opting out of the whole debate. I think that when everything is non-private, accessible and feeding some mega trending/segmentation/analytics machine - it's what we choose to keep private, discreet and personal that *really* starts to matter.
Hmmmmm typewritten letters as the last true samizdat...
I detest the fact that large amounts of information about our personal lives, about typecasts, about everything is recorded by a computer or camera in nearly all activities. I would love to completely unplug. However, the catch is that I wouldn't be able to be part of the wonderful typosphere. I have already limited e-mail use to company e-mail. I no longer use Facebook (or anything of the sort) and I no longer own a cell phone. Now, I realize that my call records from my landline at home can be traced and used. But if I choose to walk outside and go somewhere, thereby making myself unable to be reached, there is no record of it unless I go to a place that has a surveillance camera, which is most places. I realize my bank account can be scrutinized and that information has been available about private matters long before the internet. I feel like non-internet related things would require work for an actual person to access, while internet-related activity is monitored by a dumb non-human gadget constantly.
ReplyDeleteI realize it wouldn't be rational to completely unplug, not if I want to find out about things like typewriters, but I HATE the amount of surveillance that exists these days. And like you said, if Stephen King thinks it's creepy, boy, watch out. I suppose the moderate thing to do is to think very carefully about information gets posted/sent through electronic means.
(Sorry for the longwindedness. This is a subject that I think about often and get just a tad bit passionate about.)
I heard that story - it is a worrisome trend, to be sure. It's all "opt-out" rather than "in" these days. I wonder if the kindle for pc does the same thing. I mean, for the price of the kindle I can get like a dozen typewriters!
ReplyDeleteThis worries me - I used to think that typecast images/scans were largely off-grid in a sense because the googlebots of the world couldn't 'read' their content. But it makes sense that they'd use OCR technology on these images as well. Which means the only things that aren't scanned/assimilated/categorised/monitored are... letters, private conversations etc.
ReplyDeleteWhich means our world is getting more and more like a Philip K Dick world every day; and we largely don't care about it.
Not long ago there was a lot of stink about facebook and privacy, but I think people are simply opting out of the whole debate. I think that when everything is non-private, accessible and feeding some mega trending/segmentation/analytics machine - it's what we choose to keep private, discreet and personal that *really* starts to matter.
Hmmmmm typewritten letters as the last true samizdat...