Tag Archives: The Internet of Things

The Beady Eye looks at the benefits and non benefits of Social Media.

20 Monday Jul 2015

Posted by in Social Media., Technology, The Future

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I would like to think you’re here not necessarily because your agree or disagree with what I write, but that you think it is worth hearing and want to learn, interact and debate with me. If you like pressing the like button this is not the place to find the like button.  Lets hear your views.Eyes Robot Cyborg wallpaper background

Social Media a vast and complex subject far to large to cover all aspects.

In this post I am going to try to address some of the more obscure effects it is having on all of us or could have in not the so distant future.

How much do we understand this new dictatorship we’re in?

IF YOU ASKED ME I WOULD SAY: WE DON’T HAVE A CLUE.

Technology has revolutionized the way people go about their daily activities..

Google received over 2 million search queries per minute. The Number of people who use Twitter 302 million monthly active users 28/04/2015. Apple in the last three months turned over 60 billion a 40% profit of 11billion.

Facebook its monthly active users cleared 1.35 billion — roughly equal the population of China, and 9 percent larger than that of India. By these numbers, nearly 20 percent of the world’s population logs into Facebook once a month. And if we just look at the worlds Internet users, roughly half of them — every other person with Internet on the planet — use the site actively. 936 million daily 22/04/2015.

Half of all Internet-users live in “Facebookistan”

In the time it takes you to read this sentence more than 684,478 pieces of content will be shared on Facebook, 100,000 people will tweet, hundreds of thousands more will “like” an Instagram photo…and that’s if you read very quickly.

Access to technology has become an integral part of education, socialisation and industry related requirements, and accordingly Internet usage is evolving and growing rapidly. It is changing the way we shop to the way we drop. It does not care about time or distance. Everyone can be online every time and communicate with everyone everywhere.

The internet is home to millions of sites, representing both commerce and the people who share their thoughts and experiences with anyone who visits. The internet users worldwide now represents 3.17 billion, or in other words half of the current world population.  

The question is whether the effortless, ever-changing world of online social life is in fact one that ultimately undermines the ability to explore narrative, and place people, ideas and events in wider contexts.

There is no argument that it is effecting the way we all live but if we don‟t act to enhance inter generational communication, we risk generating a culture structured by a digital/communication divide between young people, their parents and older members of the community.

Cyber citizenship, if it is to retain relevance and deliver benefits to the community, therefore, is a concept that would more usefully be applied to the community as a whole, rather than as a set of policies that target young people as requiring protecting – or protection from – in a digital landscape.

Our understanding of cyber citizenship must be more holistic, to fully encompass and resonate across all of the settings in which we live our lives – be that home, school, work, our local communities or our communities of interest.

So what effect is Social Media actually having on the world communicates and our life styles.

For example:

The internet is the place to interact with new people and a way to expose yourself to strangers. The partial anonymity available online can be used as a mask for sexual offenders and psychos;

Social media is being used as a tool by movie studios well ahead of a film’s release to help shape the marketing campaign.

Billions of Amateur videos, posted on social media websites.

Americans across the country took to social media to celebrate the Supreme Court’s decision making same-sex marriage a right.

Its replacing communication by letter or phone.

Twitter and Facebook are only two of the online connections people use today to stay in contact with friends and family.

The entire purpose of setting up social media networks around the world is to allow and promote the world to communicate and connect with one another. However, the trend that seems to be following this widespread connection and communication is the exact opposite.

It all appears to boil down to you having no way of really knowing what is the truth and what is the lie. 

Someone’s life and personality neatly tucked away in the cyber-universe.

Do the dangers of online networking far outweigh the benefits?

Who knows.

One of the great dangers as far as I am concerned is the establishment of an economic order that would apply to all, everywhere.

No social animal is ever guided by the interest of the entire species to which it belongs.

Social Media allows cooperation with complete strangers who are imagined to be your friends. This could lead to the entire human race becoming a single unit governed by a single set of laws. These days we think of the planet as a single unit but for most of its history it was in fact an entire galaxy of isolated human worlds.

The ever tightening social media links will in the long run destroy individuality.  We are now living in an age of technology where the information contained on these sites is now being used against us.

So the benefits of SNS use are dependent on good internet and media literacy: having the skills to critically understand, analyse and create media content while avoiding addiction.

Young people are consuming, producing, sharing and remixing media.

This has led to the claim that today‟s young people are produsers‟ they actively produce and consume media. The importance of SNS in young people‟s everyday lives is indisputable: 90% of 12 to 17 year olds, and 97% of 16 to 17 year olds, use SNS

Social media has begun to create an unsociable disconnected generation of young adults… they lack awareness of the public nature of the internet. This include the management of personal information and privacy, the risk of predation and cyber bullying.  Can it be minimised?

It is compromising the development and maintenance of supportive friendships and involvement in institutions traditionally understood as the embodiment of “communities‟, namely school, sports clubs, families etc.

Social networking sites have become an important additional arena for politics. It increasingly important for the expression of identity.

What can be done if anything.

Education MUST increased internet and media literacy – ensuring all young people develop the skills to critically understand, analyse and create media content.

With the lack of parental supervision between the ages of fourteen to seventeen, which makes one of largest demographics using social networking sites, these teens ARE subjected to mature elements..

Teenagers are finding their identity in the world, they are the “my space generation” (Livingstone, 2008) the internet has allowed them to connect with people from all over the world but do they choose to do that…

It is presenting mankind with the biggest opportunity to change the course of history.  It is exposing the Inequalities and making the world aware of our common vulnerabilities.

Then there is growing power of Petitions not to mention the job market or trial by Social Media and the greed of the business world which is beginning to be recognized for what it is by targeting Advertising.

As I said don’t press the like button be an individual and leave a comment.

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Where has the Present gone?

06 Friday Mar 2015

Posted by in Technology

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We are the first humans to live in the future.

In my last post ” You are not a Gadget. Yet ” I attempted to outline how society is being reinvented by the internet, our connected devices – the internet of things.

You might not agree that they are having an effect. If not, you need to wake up.

As in all moments of major technological change, people, companies, and institutions feel the depth of the change, but they are often overwhelmed by it, out of sheer ignorance of its effects.

The Internet, as all technologies, does not produce effects by itself it is the storage of Data that will shape the future. 

Big Data is used almost anywhere these days; A vast subject- from news articles to professional magazines, from tweets to YouTube videos and blog discussions, impacting across virtually all academic disciplines.

Every minute of your existence is being stored and this vast storage is the most relevant subject of our times. DATA NOW STREAM from our daily life:

Today, machines seem to get better every day at digesting vast gulps of information from phones and credit cards and televisions and computers; from the infrastructure of cities; from sensor-equipped buildings, trains, buses, planes, bridges, and factories, you name it —

And they remain as emotionally inert as ever.       But for how long.

It is estimated that if all the data used in the world today were written to CD-ROMs and the CD-ROMs piled up in a single stack, the stack would stretch all the way from the Earth to the Moon and a quarter of the way back again.

The data flow so fast that the total accumulation of the past two years—a zettabyte—dwarfs the prior record of human civilization.

A report by the International Data Corporation in 2010 estimated that by the year 2020 there will be 35 Zettabytes (ZB) of digital data created per year.

All of what we do today leaves a digital trail:

Every bit of that information is being stored—but by whom? for what?

The US alone is home to 898 exabytes (1 EB = 1 billion gigabytes)—nearly a third of the global total.

Kilobyte     1,000 bytes

Megabyte  1,000,000 bytes

Gigabyte  1,000,000,000 bytes

Terabyte  1,000,000,000,000 bytes

Petabyte   1,000,000,000,000,000 bytes

Exabyte    1,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes

Zettabyte   1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes

Yottabyte    1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes

Just in case you have no concept of a byte.  A byte is a sequence of 8 bits (enough to represent one alphanumeric character) processed as a single unit of information. A single letter or character would use one byte of memory (8 bits), two characters would use two bytes (16 bits).

So you would want to be certified to think that Society as we know it is not a changing. 

The question is:  What is all of this information going to produce.

There is already an algorithm to detect when women were pregnant by tracking purchases of items such as unscented lotions—and offered special discounts and coupons to those valuable patrons. To plunder the Stock Exchange/Foreign Exchange. (See previous Posts)

Credit-card companies have found unusual associations in the course of mining data to evaluate the risk of default: people who buy anti-scuff pads for their furniture, for example, are highly likely to make their payments.

They are trained computers to identify deep patterns in vocal pitch, rhythm, and intensity; their software can scan a conversation between a woman and a child and determine if the woman is a mother, whether she is looking the child in the eye, whether she is angry or frustrated or joyful.

Other machines can measure sentiment by assessing the arrangement of our words, or by reading our gestures. Still others can do so from facial expressions.

Before you think about anything it has already being done. Good bye to the Present.

Big data is not just about helping an organization be more successful – to market more effectively or improve business operations. It reaches to far more socially significant issues as well. It is transforming science, engineering, medicine, healthcare, finance, business, and ultimately society itself.

The first full human genome sequence took five to 15 years to complete, and cost $1 billion to $3 billion. Now a genome sequence takes a little more than 24 hours and costs about $1,000.

NASA receives over 4 TB of new Earth Science data each day.

It Uses THE SHADOW Internet THAT’S 100 TIMES FASTER THAN GOOGLE FIBER.

Like me you problem never hear of it and will never get to use it.

Google's data centre in Douglas Country, Georgia: The amount of data held by the internet giant means there may soon need to be a new number created to measure the quantity

So what am I exactly trying to say here.

I suppose the best starting point is the Human Brain.

Your brain is home to around 100 billion neurons, all of which are perpetually establishing and breaking connections, known as synapses, with other neurons.

There are trillions of these connections throughout your brain helping orchestrate everything from movement, to learning, to establishing and recalling memories. Just to give you some perspective on the storage capacity of your brain: It has a storage capacity of some estimates come in as low as 1 terabyte, or approximately 1,000 gigabytes.

You can easily buy a 1 gigabyte USB drive for under £15. A gigabyte is 1000 megabytes, so that means you’ve got three brains right there.

For comparison, if your brain worked like a digital video recorder in a television, 2.5 petabytes would be enough to hold three million hours of TV shows. You would have to leave the TV running continuously for more than 300 years to use up all that storage.

Now consider this:

A sweet little external hard drive can give you an entire terabyte of memory for about £70. That’s 1000 gigabytes, and roughly 3333 human brains. So for £70 bucks, you could store 3333 people’s brains in your backpack.  Nice!

If you want to back up your brain and upload it to a cylon body, IBM’s “neurosynaptic” chips are the closest thing to a synthetic brain yet.

Also, consider this:

A typical 3-minute song takes up about 5 megabytes of space. So that means your brain, can hold about 60 songs.

A computer chip that emulates the human brain - and might one day replace it

Now don’t get me wrong I acknowledge that every major scientific revolution has been driven by one thing, and that is data.

Data is pouring in from every conceivable direction: from operational and transactional systems, from scanning and facilities management systems, from inbound and outbound customer contact points, from mobile media and the Web.

Organizations are inundated with data – terabytes and petabytes of it. According to IDC, “In 2011, the amount of information created and replicated will surpass 1.8 zettabytes (1.8 trillion gigabytes), growing by a factor of nine in just five years.

That’s nearly as many bits of information in the digital universe as stars in the physical universe.

I have nothing against the collection of Data nor with sharing the data, which ultimately could improve the lives of the millions of people who are generating it—and the societies in which they are living – to provide a beneficial impact on society as a whole.

The potential for doing good is perhaps nowhere greater than in public health and medicine, fields in which, “People are literally dying every day” simply because data are not being shared.

There are over 200 satellites in orbit continuously collecting data about the atmosphere and the land, ocean and ice surfaces of planet Earth which might save us from Climate Change.

Some of this data is held in transactional data stores – the byproduct of fast-growing online activity. Machine-to-machine interactions, such as metering, call detail records, environmental sensing and RFID systems, generate their own tidal waves of data.  All these forms of data are expanding, and that is coupled with fast-growing streams of unstructured and semi structured data from social media.“

The challenges facing big data today and going forward including, but not limited to: data capture and storage; search, sharing, and analytics; big data technologies; data visualization; architectures for massively parallel processing; data mining tools and techniques; machine learning algorithms for big data; cloud computing platforms; distributed file systems and databases; and scalable storage systems.

In bio medicine the Human Genome Project is determining the sequences of the three billion chemical base pairs that make up human DNA.

Big Data is further expected to add more than €250 billion a year to the European public sector administration. Thus, the whole European Union could benefit from the cumulative financial and social impact of Big Data.

One clear example of Big Data is the Square Kilometer Array (SKA) (www.skatelescope.org) planned to be constructed in South Africa and Australia. When the SKA is completed in 2024 it will produce in excess of one exabyte of raw data per day (1 exabyte = 1018 bytes), which is more than the entire daily internet traffic at present.

Another example of Big Data is the Large Hadron Collider, at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN), which has 150 million sensors and is creating 22 petabytes of data in 2012 (1 Petabyte = 1015 bytes).

Smart cities, data gathered by sensors integrated with transport data, financial transactions, location of users, social network interaction will provide an entirely new dimension to thinking about how cities function.

These three examples are only scratching the surface.

Google almost certainly has more data storage capacity than any other organization on Earth. Their biggest data centers cost half a billion to a billion dollars, so they can’t have more than 20 or so of those. These are the storage centers we know about.

  1. Berkeley County, South Carolina
  2. Council Bluffs, Iowa
  3. Atlanta, Georgia
  4. Mayes County, Oklahoma
  5. Lenoir, North Carolina
  6. The Dalles, Oregon
  7. Hong Kong
  8. Singapore
  9. Taiwan
  10. Hamina, Finland
  11. St Ghislain, Belgium
  12. Dublin, Ireland
  13. Quilicura, Chilie
  14. Eemshaven, Netherlands
  15. Groningen, Netherlands
  16. Budapest, Hungary
  17. Wrocław, Poland
  18. Reston, Virginia
  19. Additional sites near Atlanta, Georgia

In 2010, they were operating around a million servers, with close to 10 exabytes of active storage attached to running clusters. Google has a hard drive die every few minutes.

Let’s assume Google has a storage capacity of 15 exabytes, or 15,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes.

  • Amazon (They’re huge, but probably not as big as Google.)
  • Facebook (They’re on the right scale and growing fast, but still playing catch-up.)
  • Microsoft (They have a million servers, although no one seems sure why.)

However, it’s nothing compared to the ridiculous claims by some news reports about the NSA datacenter in Utah. This facility could hold “between an exabyte and a yottabyte” of data.Microsoft data center

Apple tends to make between three and five times as much revenue as Google does. Whether it is Apple or Google at the top of the heap, you cannot deny that they are both building platforms and business models that will shape the next decade in the tech industry.

Computing is definitely moving to the cloud, and Microsoft, Google, and Amazon are all in it to win it by manipulate us all.

Because the shifts in both the amount and potential of today’s data are so epic, businesses require more than simple, incremental advances in the way they manage information.

Public Sector Information (PSI) is the single largest source of information in Europe. Its estimated market value is €32 billion.

The value of Big Data to the UK economy alone, being £216 billion and 58,000
jobs in the next 5 years.

Data traffic is expected to grow to 10.8 Exabyte per month by 2016.

Could we have foreseen the mortgage meltdown, the financial institution crisis and the recession, if only we had gotten our arms around more data and done more to correlate it?

Could we trim millions of dollars in fraud from government programs and financial markets?

But big data wants more.

Not satisfied with seeing everything about everybody it wants to store your spoken words which for thousands and thousands of year were private and should remain private.

For us to allow or turn a blind eye to this kind of monitoring and storage would be the first steps to towards slavery.  

Such a move by Governments under the cloud of spotting terrorists plots is a form of terrorism on free speech.  All Smart Phone should be be encrypt to ensure the freedom of mankind.

So I will leave you with this.

Modern science demands the use and understanding of numerical methods.

Data is like an object approaching a fixed point. It is travelling at a constant speed, such that, after one second, the distance is halved: after 1.5 seconds, the distance is halved again; after 1.75 seconds, it is halved again and so on. So data will never actually reach the fixed point, because with each fraction of a second it only halves the distance remaining.  Both the Data and the distance can theoretically be split infinitely.

Big Data technologies to analyse and properly compare disperse and huge data sets would provide huge benefits in terms of discoveries in experimental sciences.

And you think you live in the Present- think again.

Exabytes, zettabytes and yottabytes definitely are on the horizon.

But tell me where is hindsight located? Only then we will be able to cut through the myths surrounding the key technology of our time.

No single person can make sense of what a billion other people are saying. The best way to Safeguard personal data is not to give it in the first place.

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You Are not a Gadget. Yet!

04 Wednesday Mar 2015

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This is what I call – A run up the flag pole post – see who salutes.

Sorry it’s also another rather long-winded post.

We can’t go anywhere, do anything without our Gadgets.

In my last post I said that Inequality was at the heart of most of our troubles in the world.

But is the Internet (which is without the qualities of Love and Tolerance) also contributing by having an effect on Society/Community and spreading discontent by highlighting these Inequalities? I would say (All technologies have their downsides) Yes.

To Say that humankind is now almost entirely connected, albeit with great levels of inequality in bandwidth, efficiency, and price, is not quite yet a reality.

There are about fifteen billion devices presently connected and there will be around forty billion devices connected by 2020.

There are about 16 million subscribers of wireless devices in the world.

In 2013 it was close to 7 billion (in a planet of 7.7 billion human beings). In 2014, nearly 75% (2.1 billion) of all internet users in the world (2.8 billion) live in the top 20 countries, sending around 114 billion e mails each day of which 68.8% are spam.

Ninety eight percent of all information existing in the planet is digitized and most of it is accessible on the Internet and other computer networks.

Think about what happens when we connect all of those unconnected devices.

We will all turn into Me-centered society.

Does anyone care other than those that have being effected that another Social relationships is being reconstructed on the basis of individual interests, values, and projects, and not on the values that are shared through out the World.

Today, social networking sites are the preferred platforms for all kinds of activities, both business and personal, and sociability has dramatically increased — but it is a different kind of sociability that conveys the best and the worse in humankind.

Technology is already a second skin for young people. 

While highlight the gaps between the Haves and Haves Nots. The Internet is on one hand desensitizing us as individuals.

It is doing this by disintermediating government and corporate control of communication.

Horizontal communication networks are creating a new landscape of social and political change. The consequences of which are not understood and will not be for some considerable time to come.

More than 50 billion ‘things’ are projected to be connected to the Internet by 2020, which, combined with advanced big data analytics, will constitute a giant, intelligent network that will change the way we govern, trade, and interact.

Technology is a material culture and the Internet is the technology of freedom that allows us to do what we wish with this material culture.

To date we are overwhelmed by it, out of sheer ignorance of its effects. It is like a Bulgarian riddle – Here I am, there I am, and yet they cannot catch me.

At the moment we are unable to access its effects and implications, so there will always be a gap between social change and its understanding. To the full understanding of the world in which we live is becoming an impossibility due to consent distraction.

So let us address some effects before virtual life becomes more social than the physical life, but it is less a virtual reality than a real virtuality.  If you get what I mean.

Community is formed through individuals’ quests for like-minded people in a process that combines online interaction with offline interaction, cyberspace, and the local space. Our social environment, how we enjoy ourselves, how we buy, what we study, how we travel,… Everything we do has changed thanks to the Internet and a host of spin-off technologies. From the alphabet to clocks and printing, every major new technology has profoundly altered the way in which humans think.

Take for instance Facebook users: They visit the site daily, and they connect on multiple dimensions, but only on the dimensions they choose.

Unquestionably this change has also reached the business world. How will the business of the future function? Big data is undoubtedly one of the key ingredients for a successful transformation that has already begun. Networks are global and know no boundaries,  but the network society is a global network society with no rules.

Many public issues and social voices are pushed to the margins of society by market values and commercial communication, making it difficult to get the attention of those living in the “walled gardens” of consumerism.

For example:

In work (entrepreneurship), in the media (the active audience), in the Internet (the creative user), in the market (the informed and proactive consumer), in education (students as informed critical thinkers, making possible the new frontier of e-learning and m-learning pedagogy), in health (the patient-centered health management system) in e-government (the informed, participatory citizen), in social movements (cultural change from the grassroots, as in feminism or environmentalism), and in politics (the independent-minded citizen able to participate in self-generated political networks).

If the dominant cultural trend in our society is the search for autonomy, and if the Internet powers this search, then we are moving toward a society of assertive individuals and perhaps cultural freedom.

Yet, the global network society is our society, and the understanding of its logic on the basis of the interaction between culture, organization, and technology, in the formation and development of social and technological networks is key to what society is going to be in the future.  For example the Intense use of the Internet increases the risk of isolation, alienation, and withdrawal from society.

Already from this Internet-based culture of autonomy here is emerging a new kind of sociability, networked sociability, and a new kind of sociopolitical practice, networked social movements and networked democracy.

Did it lend a hand in the creation of Jihad John and ISIS.

Whether it did or not the Web constitute the technological infrastructure of the global network society, yet it continues to feed the fears and the fantasies of those who are still in charge of a society that they barely understand.

The digital gadgets on which we now depend, have already begun rewiring our brains. We are offloading thinking to technology, using our phones as our extended minds.

Smartphones users Worldwide will surpass 2 billion in 2016 i.e. ¼ of the Global population and will be 3 billion by 2018. 

From a society that valued the creation of a unique storehouse of ideas in each individual, man is moving to a socially constructed mind that values speed and group approval over originality and creativity.

Some evolutionary biologists claim that the scholarly mind is a historical anomaly: that humans, like other primates, are designed to scan rapidly for danger and opportunity. If so, the net delivers this shallow, scattered mindset with a vengeance. Hyperlinks and over stimulation mean the brain must give most of its attention to short-term decisions.

The digital technology is already damaging the long-term memory consolidation that is the basis for true intelligence. 

In particular clicking, skipping, skimming—and especially on working and deep memory.                           Is Google Making Us Stupid?

Something is always lost, and something gained.

Here are a few unanswered Questions.

  • How will privacy issues impact upon the uptake of the Internet of Things in democratic institutions?
  • What is the role of Government in an age of Smart Cities and algorithmic regulation?
  • How can civil society institutions ensure that the Internet of Things is harnessed for the public good?
  • How can technologies be designed to create deeper civic engagement?
  • What are the global implications on foreign policy of connecting the unconnected?
  • How can the Internet of Things impact developing countries?
  • What is the potential impact of the Internet of Things on transnational crime?
  • Cyber crime and Cyber security.
  • How will the Internet of Things affect critical national infrastructure?
  • Hyper connected Diplomacy.
  • Encryption and Integrity.

And then you have Humor.

To what extent does the Internet function as a mediator of ‘old’ or traditional humorous forms and topics (e.g. jokes), and to what extent does it facilitate‘new’ humorous forms and topics (e.g. digitally manipulated photographs) in cyber-humor.

Since visual language can move across cultures more easily than verbal language ask yourself if the Internet has become a major actor in the production and distribution of humor.

Internet use empowers people by increasing their feelings of security, personal freedom, and influence, all feelings that have a positive effect on happiness and personal well-being.

Humor appears in many kinds of Websites, spanning personal/amateur blogs that provide funny and lighthearted commentary on events to commercial or professional Websites which often link to mass media such as newspapers (e.g. http://www.theonion.com) and television (e.g.www.comedycentral.com).

How do the new forms and topics of online humor relate to fundamental characteristics of the Internet, specifically interactivity, multimedia and global reach?

The joke might indeed be dead as an oral form since visual language can move across cultures more easily than verbal language. Jokes have been transformed to a popular Internet-based written form-home video’ and ‘media slapstick’ humor.

Why are the types of ‘home video’ and ‘media slapstick’ so popular on You Tube.

Is it because they are personal pieces that seem to reflect the bottom-up nature of the Internet as a space in which everyone, and not only professional comedians, can create humorous content. This kind of humor is not culture specific – a man who slips on a banana peel will probably be regarded as funny in many parts of the globe, by members of various age and gender groups.

How does comedy undermine or reinforce our attitudes towards race, gender, religion, class and ethnicity?

Does what makes us laugh reveal our deep social norms and taboos?

In viral Internet-based commercials, humor is an integral, almost obligatory component but violence as a means of humor in advertising is on the rise.

Viral advertisements,’  Top ten things men know about women’ or ‘Twenty excuses to miss a day of work.

Not only are the vast majority of texts in English, but they also reflect the values and priorities of Western, capitalist and youth-oriented cultures.  However, the definitions of interactivity, as well as the methods for their ope rationalization, remain in dispute.

Culture jamming argue that culture, politics, and social values have been bent by saturated commercial environments, from corporate logos on sports facilities, to television content designed solely to deliver targeted audiences to producers and sponsors. The Internet is wide open to this form of brain washing.

When it comes to humor has the Web has been corporatized?   Interactivity is perceived as an important key to understanding the social implications of the Internet.

That everything is worth making fun of, nothing should be taken seriously, not even a guy getting punched in the face until he bleeds or Hitler reacting to an incident.

Last but not least we come to the Question of Porn.

The Internet is saturated with porn that is debasing us all.

Should there be a safety door into a segregated area of the internet into which all pornographic content should be placed. Viewable only by those how supply online personal details, such as age, positive Id. It would be a step in the right direction. Not Censorship but sensible Stewardship.

If you are not already Gadgetry I would be interested to hear you views.

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Technology is making us conscious of the need for a new society.

20 Tuesday Jan 2015

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In my last post I said that “Technology is making us conscious of the need for a new society.” It was a thought without an explanation.Illustration

It seems pretty obvious to most observers that our social networks have changed in the past few decades thanks to technology. The widespread use of cell phones, the increasing affordability of air travel, the rise of the Internet, and the advent of social media have changed the way we work, the way we live, and the way we make and maintain friendships, the way we view the world.

Our increasing on-line connectives is and has changed our perceptions of our social world for the better and to the determent of reality. The world of social networking sites is changing every day and is going to have more impact on the lives of generations to come. Because television and other popular forms of social media shape our perception of reality.

Nothing epitomises the anonymity of the Internet more than Anonymous.

Anonymity can be extremely dangerous, particularly to governments.

On the other hand sharing is all the rage these days.  Sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn allow people across the globe to broadcast every detail of their lives with the rest of the world through the mediums of text, audio, photo and video. Nowadays, the internet has simplified everything to the extent where you’re never more than a few minutes away from what you need.

However is the on-line world truly distinct from the off-line one?

Illegal activity such as drug distribution or human trafficking are handled through the ‘deep web’, areas of the internet not indexed by search engines. The worldwide group of self-proclaimed ‘hacktivists’ whose actions have had a number of significant impacts on corporations around the globe are another example.

General internet opinion is undoubtedly one of the most effective ways of establishing a consensus on something, with businesses or Governments ignoring public opinion doing so at their peril.

Technology hasn’t undermined our social relationships, although it has certainly affected them.

The prevalence of social media has, as a result, fundamentally changed the way we read and watch: we think about how we’ll share something, and whom we’ll share it with, as we consume it.

So what impact does Facebook have on today’s technologically advanced society?

Facebook’s effect on today’s society is not difficult to distinguish. … Facebook opens up other questions about today’s society, too. … in the age of digital communication when we can follow our state and national politicians on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. But it remains nothing more than a medium for communication, and yet, it is so much more than that. At a glance, a user can learn everything from what gender a Facebook member is, to what religion they believe in, what school they attend, and their likes and dislikes, all with the click of a mouse.

In other words, the world of constant connectivity and media, as embodied by Facebook, is the social network’s worst enemy.

The time of mentally entertaining ourselves, is disappearing. We’ve forgotten how.” Whenever we have downtime, the Internet is an enticing, quick solution that immediately fills the gap. We get bored, look at Facebook or Twitter, and become more bored.

Getting rid of Facebook wouldn’t change the fact that our attention is, more and more frequently, forgetting the path to proper, fulfilling engagement. And in that sense, Facebook isn’t the problem. It’s the symptom.

The number of things we have pulling at our attention, the less we are able to meaningfully engage, and the more discontented we become. What Facebook does to our emotional state may be in simply looking at what people actually do when they’re on Facebook. What makes it complicated is that Facebook is for lots of different things—and different people use it for different subsets of those things.

Topics such as cyber bullying, addiction to cyber porn, and overall addiction to Internet games are something we need to study more.

The Internet may increase the overall frequency of communication but it is opening a new forum of disconnection to what really matters in our lives. The internet doesn’t just offer information in comprehensive fashion, it offers it instantaneously.

It is an ongoing record of human history – regardless of how much it continues to grow, individuals will always be able to access some obscure story from the earlier nineties, for instance, ensuring that almost anything we create today will never be lost to future generations.

Sites that mix professional and public criticism together, such as Rotten Tomatoes or Meta Critic, are now regarded as highly important by the likes of film and game manufacturers, as negative reception spreads more quickly than ever and sales are impacted as a result.

Crowd sourcing is allowing projects to source investment, interest and possible custom from a huge user base.

E Bay is providing a medium for consumers to make exchanges with other consumers, allowing people to sell their unwanted goods rather than throwing them away.

YouTube, Sound Cloud or U stream, is used to distribute either pre-recorded or live material.

Trip Advisor, where everything from restaurants to hotels are looked at in meticulous detail.

Netflix and catch-up services. Tailored marketing, literature, games, films and television have outgrown the need for a costly physical medium such as a book or disc, and are accessible in an instant on the likes of e-book readers.

From car-sharing and house-hunting to dating and charitable donation sourcing, somebody somewhere seems to have come up with an online solution that makes things easier, and long may it stay that way.

What is lacking (for lack of a better word) is an Internet World Political Party.MapBoxOSM

A rallying point to bring the power of the Internet to address the Inequalities in our world.

To increases social trust and engagement—and even encourages political participation. It would impart a feelings of bonding with a general social capital increase that could be used to pressurize change for the good of us all.

We live our lives immersed in technology, surrounded by cell phones, computers, video games, digital music players and video cams.

The Internet of Things : ’The home of the future. Your own personal digital ‘nanny’ to control almost every element of your life through apps or a web browser.

People will not only make their entire home web-connect and use it for personal benefits they will also become addicted to their Digital Nanny. 

The Internet of things will become central to society than the internet as we know it today, its role will probably be reduced in the future.

Nonetheless, it’s definitely exciting to see what the future brings other than –                                                     “Liking.”

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