It is simply amazing! Okay, taking the fact I have become an insomiac is not in question, or amazing. No, not really. But just how much technology is heading in the direction to make sure each single one of us is as interconnected with pretty much everything else. It is 10:00pm, do you know where your friend’s are? You can now, simply check with Google Calendar! We are Masters of our own lives but we are lending the keys to them to Google? We can trust them, right?
On a related note, just today, I was able to see a live shot of the Santorini islands in Greece. No, they were not rehashed pics from earlier in the year. Oh no, that would not have been techie enough. They were pictures taken only 30 seconds before. The catch is it is nightime in Santorini Greece and all you can see aside a few white dots in the distance is darkness. Probably just some people smoking tabacco, or not, but saying to themselves ‘Ah, life is simple here…and good.’ Perhaps completely unaware that I have the power to completely spy on them –assuming it was daylight– from half a world away. Why? Because someone thought it cool to put a webcam there re-freshing every 60 seconds. Sure this has existed for quite sometime, but webcam shots of utterly pitch blackness?
Which brings me to the whole connectivity thing. I mean, Google sent me an invitation to their new Calendar (Beta) project. Sure it is like any other on-line calendar, but it is also incorporated into my email and…ARE YOU READY for this? I can pretty much email my calendar to every single friend I have. How cool is that?
‘Hey guys! There is a party in my Calendar and everyone is invited!’
Now EVERYONE could just with a few clicks know whether I was with my wife, at my yearly prostate check, or at which time I am going to drop by my mistress. Oh, the joy.
Alright, I am NOT married or have a mistress, the point is, aren’t we with our geeky fantasies of being interconnected at breakneck speeds loosing our sense of self along the way?
Not only are we loosing our right to privacy –which is happening daily under many pretences– some may call it ‘security,’ but it seems we are mostly doing it to either satisfy a need to be heard or simple, unadulterated vanity. I believe we are loosing focus of the simplest things in life.
Of course, the irony has not been lost in the fact you are reading these pretty words of mine from a BLOG. However the truth is there. The Medium is the message, eh? An sometimes she\he is a bitch: “You don’t know how to use a computer? You looser!” Albeit we are generally too happy to comply. Since we keep thinking is the next step in human evolution.
I mean, with the craziness of blogs, photoblogs, apps like MSN’s My Space and an army of other tools like Messengers and LinkIn (Meetup.com anyone?), very soon we are going to have choose to either live in the real world where is sunny and be left for technologically dead dinosaurs or jack ourselves in and be part of our society’s early version of a Matrix, yes, like the movie. What a cliched and weird methaphor. How sad.
So, I as sat earlier today, setting up my new GOOGLE calendar, I got a kick of sharing it (free\busy times only) to a few friends. Why just the free\busy times? Well, I do not want everyone to peek fully into my life, or at least that is what I am telling myself. Albeit not from Google Inc, who I am sure are keeping an ever watchful eye, you know, for BETA research purposes. It just reminds me of that scene from the movie: ‘Neo, do you choose the blue pill or the red pill.’
If it was up to me, I would say, ‘Uh, which one is the cool one?’ But until then, I have to admit I am getting hooked to this Gmail calendar, I mean, the thing is bloody useful. Then again, I know that since I work in IT, I am more likely to fall prey to this things than others. Hopefully I will snap out of it soon and go read a good book instead. But in the mid-time use me as an example and save yourselves!
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