Saturday, October 27, 2007
Big Brother
This video is a year old, but Facebook's links to In-Q-Tel, the CIA and DARPA may still surprise many of you. For that matter, I was surprised to learn the political leanings of PayPal's head honchos.
What's the attraction of these "social networking" sites? Why do people share so much personal information?
Then again, I'm old school. I cannot understand why so many of America's daughters want video cameras to run as they get laid. (When Pamela did it, it was freaky; by the time Paris did it, it was common.) What's next? An entire generation without any sense of privacy?
A WORD ON PAY PAL: If you scroll down on the Screw PalPal site, you'll see some interesting news from last month: eBAY/PayPal CEO Meg Whitman sold her company stock for a cool $16,400,000. Why sell now? Why does she fear the price will go down?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
PayPal may be owned by the sort of ideologues we loathe, but I don't know of any banks, especially the bigger ones and the issuers of MC/VISA cards, who share my politics. I found the Screw PayPal site too illiterate for my own narrow-mindedness, plus I've given PayPal the benefit of the doubt where their sucking up to power is concerned. PayPal since its inception has veered one RCH from being an actual bank, and as a bank would therefore fall under all those regulations. If that were the case, PayPal couldn't have existed as a free service for most of its users. PayPal and eBay were and remain ingenious enterprises. In my lifetime, only The Beatles' Apple Corps (which failed) was a fully conscientious and progressive corporation, without any ties or strings to Warbucks, Inc. I suppose Dean Kamen, the inventor of the Segway PT and magical devices for disabled people, would be a righteous capitalist if he would amass the wealth.
If you read McLuhan, especially his seminal The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) and Understanding Media (1964), along with Rollo May, you wouldn't ask about such extraordinarily complex behaviors, which the abstraction 'narcissism' explains via its infinite network of tentacles. Um, the theory goes something like this: since the invention of the telegraph in 1844 and the development of electricity and its technologies, we are able to be in more than one place at the same time and extend our central nervous system anywhere at the speed of light. Thus, we have transcended 'natural law' and (according to much later McLuhan theories) have found the physical body to be a burden and encumbrance. As for 'narcissism', McLuhan loves to call our species 'gadget lovers' because every technology is an extension of some part of our body/mind, as the pen is an extension of the finger, the wheel an extension of the foot, the road an extension of the wheel, the empire an extension of the road, the TV the extension of the central nervous system. Yikes. But McLuhan connects narcissism with narcosis, or numbing; any new technology becomes both a narcotic and an amputation of one or more of our ordinary senses. This, he claims, alters our natural sensory ratio. The 'emotional' effects, according to Rollo May, manifest as what we call apathy and loss of affect. He refers to "the banalization of sex" and "love" in contemporary 'culture'. That reminds me of a TV ad with Shirley Jones when she concludes with "I really love my new Sunbeam blender."
I was puzzling over the question of where the name facebook comes from when it hit me that it could be a play on the name factbook. We all know who uses the name factbook ...
Post a Comment