no lecture (or un unlecture) this week, so instead of talking about the lecture, I’m going to talk about all of the things I did instead of going to the lecture, like catch up on other assignments and drink coffee… not really…

I watched the youtube video adrian linked us to – “the machine is us/ing us”.

the quote about “every time we post or tag photos we are teaching the machine” really stuck with me. in fact so much so that I kind of blurred out the rest of what was being said (and there were some interesting points about web.2 – internet being driven purely by our collaboration and sharing of information/images/content – what the consequences of this were, having to change our perspective on ownership/identity/authorship etc etc etc) back to the point… not important. EVERY TIME WE POST…WE ARE TEACHING THE MACHINE- that could seriously be the tagline for one of those terrible 80’s futuristic horror movies about robots turning evil and society shutting down because of a computer virus… it’s scary that we have created an entity that is so user-driven and reliant on our content these days – that your interaction with the internet is mapped out and documented so that it learns to pre-empt your moves. I posted a photo on facebook once and not only did the internet estimate (correctly) who all of the faces were, but where we were. that’s kind of creepy isn’t it? I have complete albums on my iphoto which are categorised into who the pictures are of, and I didn’t even do this myself, my computer automatically hooked itself up to facebook and did that. if all of this activity is going on beneath the surface, without us even realising, then is anything safe? every person you see in today’s society has some form of iphone (or smart phone). and I am CERTAIN (might call me paranoid, but hey) that someone somewhere is in a big apple building, tracking our every move. where we are at any given moment, what we like, who we talk to, the lifestyle we lead… there’s already companies on the internet who can taylor specific advertising campaigns at specific audiences through monitoring their internet usage, what’s to say this can’t happen with our smart phones? i’m sure there’s apps in the background of our phone doing all sorts of things that it doesn’t advertise – recording our conversations, our passwords…and one day, other bodies will have access to this information, probably for a small price… think of it as life-hacking.  and think of how bad of a tool it could be in the hands of, say, a serial killer?

there is my old lady rant about the internet and how it is ruining life for today.