I was browsing through some stuff and started reading a blog entry from this guy, David Pogue, who blogs for the NY Times. He starts off his post with this letter some 15-year-old wrote him, in which the indignant teenager criticizes another post of his. Anyway, the whole thing basically gets down to his point that a lot of people are not so civil on the internet. These are his theories why:

* "On the Internet, you’re anonymous. Since you don’t have to face the person you’re dumping on, you don’t see any reason to display courtesy.

I sometimes wonder why I respond a certain way to different forms of social software and technology, and was wondering whether other people felt the same way.

Lots of posts have been floating around that talk about creating identities for oneself online. IM-ing, facebook-ing, and blogging are second nature to me; when I'm doing work on the computer, I'm always signed onto AIM because to not be signed on just seems unnatural to me. It feels normal and natural to have the buddy list open on the right side of my screen.

I read an article a few weeks ago on the New York Times website (which I can't accesss anymore because it's been archived and I don't want to spend $5.00 getting a copy) about the "overconnecteds." It refers to "Generation M" aka the generation of kids born between 1980 and 2000 who grow up accustomed to technology and the computer/internet world. Whether this is a good or bad thing is a relative judgment, and depends on what the internet is being used for. I definitely agree with marmalade about the sink of time and effort that one puts into developing, oftentimes, "fake" relationships, and for me, the amount of time I spend randomly browsing blogs or facebook or IMing is atrocious, and I should really learn to cut down this habit. On the other hand, we all realize how cheap, useful, and efficient software like AIM is if we have friends on the other side of the country or in other countries whom we otherwise wouldn't get a chance to talk to. For that, I'm grateful to social software.

Something that Jill Walker mentions in her essay about Online Caroline reminded me of a flash video that I'd seen recently. I briefly touched on the Big Brother issue at the end of my last post, but then I remembered this really relevant video.

Walker talks briefly about the Big Brother aspect of sites like Online Caroline, and then she alludes to the similar "adjustment to user's behavior [that] is used a lot in marketing." (304) For example, "Epinions.com arranges articles so the ones I see first are ones similar to others I've liked, or are highly rated by people whose writing I've rated highly." (304) And, as we all know, Amazon.com does the same thing, which I find extremely useful, except for the fact that the database is managed and processed by a computer rather than a human, so every now and then my amazon.com will think that I absolutely love emotology books about Latin roots and send me millions of such recs just because I ordered that one emotology book five years ago when I was studying for the SAT Verbal section. I'm sure we've all run into this problem before, and it reminds us that indeed computers are still just computers and not humans.