Smart Mobs?

This week I began to read, Smart Mobs, and I must admit I am scared.  Now, I understand that as a society we are already relatively dependant on technology.  However, I will not be signing up to have my cell phone grafted to the end of my hand anytime soon.  This book makes me wonder if technology will soon replace face-to-face contact all together.  Will we lose all personal connection to cell phones, computers and any new gadgets in the making?  Not only that, but is the younger generation suffering because of technology.  Many children between the ages of 10 and 18 cannot construct a grammatically correct sentence to save their lives.  A 2004 article in The Daily Orange discusses a professor blaming email and instant messaging for a decline in a student’s writing abilities.  While I admit laughing out loud the first time I saw this Cingular commercial, it honestly is not all that far off from how things really are in today’s technology-crazy world. 

Rheingold does talk about social networking on the internet.  These sites would boast that they bring people together not draw them apart.  However, how often do people lie on these sites?  Is your profile the real you?  Idunno.org raises an interesting distinction that exists in the social networking universe.  There is a big difference between identity and persona.  Social networking offers the chance to create an online persona, not an identity.  This relates back to a point I made in our class discussion on GoogleGroups about The Search.  When employers search for your name, are they seeing a clear picture of your identity or simply, your online persona?  Or, do you believe they are one in the same?  If you were to follow my daily path around the “social” internet, you would find that I have many friends that are musicians, I ask a lot of questions about event coordinating and I belong to many different recipe circles.  Is this who I am?  I sure hope there is more to me than meets the “internet eye.”  So, at the end of that ramble, I find that social networking serves to diminish real personal contact as much as technology does. 

Now, let’s see if I can step away from the gloom and doom a bit.  Honestly, I cannot imagine life without my cell phone…well both of them (work and personal).  I am hesitant to purchase an all-in-one phone and risk being reachable 24/7.  However, technology has opened so many doors in our professional and personal lives.  How many of you telecommute or hope that you will one day?  Without technology, this would be impossible.  So, much like the two sides of search, there are two sides to the technology dependent person.  And, thank God we have a choice.  In an interview with Gina Trapani, she says that we have to consciously choose to walk away from our technology.  She proposes making one weekend day a week computer free.  Unless you are checking weather or movie times, leave it alone.  Do you think you could spend an entire weekend technology free?  I’m going to turn my cell phone off this Easter Sunday and leave my computer to its power save mode.  Join me?    

Still searching….

This week I finished reading Battelle’s, The Search.  Chapter 8 entitled, Search, Privacy, Government and Evil, really caught my eye.  I admit that I am one of many people who worry about their information being so easily accessible to the world.  Battelle’s opens with a simple question, “Did you know that Google knows here you live?”  Wow, hi, that is quite eye opening.  After reading the first page of the chapter, I typed in my 10 digit phone number, and yep, up popped my name and address.  OK, you have to admit that is a little creepy.  It makes you think twice about giving someone your phone number.  

Ramblings from the Hill Country urges people to block themselves from the Google service to protect their identity and the identity of their children.  I decided to follow his advice and block my number.  I was greeted with an interesting disclaimer.  There are at least ten more websites that allow reverse phone number lookup.  So, either we are being very paranoid to think there are sex offenders typing in random ten digit numbers in hopes of finding their next victim, or we need to proactive and get an unlisted number.  At the end of the day, we can protect our identity, and whether we like it or not, it is not “searches” fault if we do not take the correct precautions.     

Another quite disturbing point Battelle made was, “you are what the index says you are.”  Lucky for me, there was a famous character with my name portrayed by Susan Hayward.  Her PageRank is higher than mine (that is, of course, until I started a LinkedIn profile for this class).  I have no interest in being defined by my online brand.  Talk about impersonal!  I want friends, family, co-workers and potential employers to get to know me through ME, not their browser.

The “Database of Intentions” is quite an interesting concept, one that Battelle expanded on in his Monday blog post.  Following our intentions through search can prove to be quite helpful.  I search for printable sheet music, and “poof,” there are numerous ads for online companies that offer that product.  Overall, search data collection has been helpful.  However, a friend of mine was recently diagnosed with a serious disease and has spent a significant amount of time researching that illness online.  She is distraught that through online data collection her browser is covered with ads for new medications and WebMD.  Obviously, she has the choice to click or not to click, but those ads hit way too close to home for her.  Just like anything in life there is a good and bad side. 

Now, onto something completely different, my Introduction to the Digital Age professor, Nicco Mele, charged us with using Google for the entirety of our internet needs this week.   This assignment relates clearly to Battelle’s predictions for the future of Google.  He proposes that Google will cover every application imaginable in the near digital future.  So, back to Nicco’s challenge, he proposed for instance, that we check blogs through Google Reader, or monitor stock prices through Google Finance, and stay true to Gmail for the week.  I was very surprised that is really was not that hard to remain Google loyal.  Other than Microsoft Outlook at work, I rarely left the Google-verse.   (As evidence, every mention of Google in this post links to a different application and I barely scratched the surface.) Do you think you could stay Google devoted for one week?       

Searching…

How did google go from being a misspelling of the number 1 with 100 zeroes after it to being the number 1 search engine in the world?  Well, John Battelle talks about just that in his book, The Search.  It is common during the work day to have someone say to you, “oh, just Google it.”  Or, over happy hour drinks to hear a friend say, “well, I googled it and found…”  Jeff Jarvis uses the term “Google U” to describe a new way of going to college that he feels sure will emerge from the Google-created universe.  First of all, what is this search fueled universe we all inhabit?  Battelle postulates that we went from a society of search to see what is out there to a society of search to find what we know is out there.  Not only do we search to find information, but we search expecting instant gratification.  For instance, today I searched for the lyrics to a song by a very new artist.  I was appalled to find the lyrics were nowhere to be found.  These feelings of disappointment and anger are relatively new to our society.  Twenty years ago, I would not have known about this artist (because I discovered her on Myspace’s top artist list), and I would have been on my way to a record store if I wanted to find the lyrics.  The Search opened my eyes to what a charmed internet life we all lead.  Using search technology, one could find my blog in the blink of an eye.  Even as I am typing this post in MSWord, I find it funny that blog comes up as a misspelled word.  However, if I transfer the text into MSWord 2007, it is no longer underlined with a red, squiggly line.  How funny that all of these thoughts were not even a concept a few short years ago. 

 President Kennedy gave a speech at Rice University in 1962.  He put scientific progress into amazing words that really created a mental picture.  He said, “No man can fully grasp how far and how fast we have come, but condense, if you will, the 50,000 years of man’s recorded history in a time span of but a half century. Stated in these terms, we know very little about the first 40 years, except at the end of them advanced man had learned to use the skins of animals to cover them. Then about 10 years ago, under this standard, man emerged from his caves to construct other kinds of shelter. Only 5 years ago man learned to write and use a cart with wheels. Christianity began less than 2 years ago. The printing press came this year, and then less than 2 months ago, during this whole 50-year span of human history, the steam engine provided a new source of power. Newton explored the meaning of gravity. Last month electric lights and telephones and automobiles and airplanes became available. Only last week did we develop penicillin and television and nuclear power, and now if America’s new spacecraft succeeds in reaching Venus, we will have literally reached the stars before midnight tonight.”  Can you imagine how President Kennedy’s speech would have changed were he alive today.  He might have added that at 11:32 PM the internet came into being, and at 11:59 PM any citizen of the universe can tap a few buttons and hold the world at their fingertips.  Kennedy spoke of reaching Venus in 1962, now he would be talking about astronauts signing onto gmail (I still see the red, squiggly line) while floating in zero gravity.  There is no doubt that Battelle hit the nail on the head.  Search is the nature of all humanity.  Daily we are striving to know all the answers, to capture all knowledge and share that new found knowledge with the world.  Google would have given the world instant pictures of Venus simply by typing Venus into Google Images search engine.  This post may lack the summary nature it should, but it is more than a summary of Battelle’s book.  It is a real woman’s moment in time.  A moment where I realized the true effect search has had on the world I call my own.  Without search, I would not be as good as I am at my job.  Without search, I would not know much of the things I know.  And, without search, I would never order carryout (who wants to pull out the phonebook).

Tim Ferriss participated in a debate on Economist.com and the question was simply, “If technology promises to simply our lives, is it failing?”  Those of us in the Google era would have to say that search has truly simplified our lives.  What are your thoughts on other current technologies?