Fascinating conversation (which I notice sprang up and ran it's
course just over a day, so that's says something for speed of
communications - I seem to recall arguing with Anthony over NVidia vs
3DFX for DAYS back in the day.) :)
A couple of things I think are interesting.
1)On texting - I don't text, email is free, use it. When people text
me, I respond by email, I think I have them trained now. I find that
texters are incredibly rude, for the most part. They come in the
store and stand there texting while you are trying to ask them
questions about their computer problem. No, young people can't
multi-task better than us, they just try to. I think it's funny
that everyone wanted to be able to talk on the phone everywhere, but
now prefer texting. I can understand it, for the points given above
(time to think before responding - which most don't do), and being
able to be more blunt than one would face to face. It's too bad the
language is being destroyed by it. I have to work to decipher the
emails my brother sends me due to auto-correct, etc.
2)On Facebook/G+/Whatever - I think it's funny (and sad and scary)
that people are selling themselves in order to have a little bit of
human interaction with people that they have (in many cases) have
never met face to face, and have never had an actual conversation
with (and I'm including email conversations as conversations, I
consider many people on this list to be friends, because we have
actually had conversations, which is more than can be said for the
Facebook style communcation):
"Fred has scratched his ass.
(10 people like this.)
Bob - Cool story, bro."
The drivel on Facebook is enough to drive one mad.
Most people don't get that they aren't consumers of Facebook's
services, they are the product. The advertisers are the
consumers. If you think that marketing (which recently heard
described as the biggest psychological experiment ever run on the
human race) was bad in the 1900s, wait until you see what it's like
in a few years time.
3)As for the privacy, I may have mentioned this before, but I
recently was attacked on another forum by a person who actually took
the time to google me and found out a significant bit of stuff by my
postings here and on other forums. I now run multiple other personas
on the Internet. I expect most intelligent people will do the same
in the future, but this will only protect you against the morons out
there. The government and big business will know more about you than
you'd like very soon, if they don't already. Orwell was only off by
a few years, and the funny thing is, people were more than willing to
sell their liberties and privacy for a few "likes" on Facebook. I
guess it's more like Huxley than Orwell.
T
