While walking around Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island this past weekend (I was there on a short holiday), I ran across this sign:
I understand why we feel the need for surveillance at almost every turn. We've been told so often that it will make us safer that we've actually come to believe it, even though we're also told that crime is getting worse, and we need to have more police officers, and prisons, and tougher sentencing... all things that shouldn't be required if in fact the increased surveillance state in which we now live really did make us safer.
It's not just video cameras on every street corner, and in every yard, however. With every post on social media networks like Facebook or Twitter, we are willingly submitting to not just the surveillance state, but a surveillance society. Our privacy isn't being taken from us; we're offering it up on the altar of belonging to a "community" of "friends" that we've never actually met, and probably never will, but with whom an increasing number of people are willing to share the most intimate details of their daily lives.
The truth is that we want to be watched, because it makes us feel as if we matter, and that we're part of something. But what does this say about us, and our inability to find true meaning and connection in this world?
This new "something" isn't real, however, and it has a cost, one that we're paying each and every day that we parade our private selves in the public square without discrimination. We are selling ourselves short, and we are selling ourselves out, as we settle for living vicariously through strangers over living in the real world with true friends.
I think there's great potential in social networking to make meaningful connections, in much the same way that people used to have "pen-pals"... similarly, one can use it for marketing, and that's a useful enough thing as well. But when it goes to the point that we essentially make ourselves into a commodity, it's gone too far - and sadly, I think that's where we're headed.
Paul Kimball
I think there's great potential in social networking to make meaningful connections, in much the same way that people used to have "pen-pals"... similarly, one can use it for marketing, and that's a useful enough thing as well. But when it goes to the point that we essentially make ourselves into a commodity, it's gone too far - and sadly, I think that's where we're headed.
Paul Kimball
