subtitle: the Machine that agrees with you.
You log on, and when you no longer want to continue, you can log off.
You search for sites and sound that fit you.
Machine = matchmaker.
You purchased this title, perhaps you would like to order that title as well.
How about connecting with this professional, or “friend”.
SEO.
First page results = prime real estate.
Forced choices
(because we can only remember top three pagerankings.)
Read top tweets.
View recommended links from friends. Click on publications you have regularly visited, and skim only headlines that catch your interests.
My world.
My mirror on the wall.
Life unchallenged, world view uncontested.
Connectivity was supposed to be content-neutral.
Is it?
In the end, the machine just amplifies your ego.
Push technologies like broadcasting have dominated last century.
Now, it’s “pull”, but we are not pulled in the right directions.
Unless, we consciously compensate for our natural tendency. Be curious. Be adventurous. View sites you might not otherwise cross path. Click on connect with people whose views you might want to debate.
That way, the diamond in you got sharpened, and eventually shined.
Two paths diverge, I take the one less traveled, says Frost.
The same poet also penned “fence makes good neighbors”.
Hence, look before you click. But also, he who hesitates to connect is lost.
In cyberspace as in life.
Mirror on the wall? who is the fairest of all?
I know they will soon sell a robot that keeps spilling out white lies.
It’s the demographic, stupid.
Next gen who grew up digital will not experience this tug of war, between the old and the new, three-dimensional reality and that of the flat screen.
Don’t tell me millions of hours in front of the CRT have been for nothing.
All the game playing, news reading, profile updating, and friend-searching amount to this: the search of one’s self in the age of digital. New play ground, new rules.
Like traditional retailers of brick and mortar, we have fumbled in trying to master this new online medium: vast quantity of materials on interactive sites and semantic Web.
Yet we brought old-world mentality to it, surrounding ourselves with Yes men.
Even post pictures of ourselves taken in the 20th century. No wonder, we fumble.
No wonder, we end up with default Search options. I am feeling very “unlucky”!!!!!!!
One of these days, I will smash the mirror, to see what’s on the other side (the 21st century equivalence of the 70’s Network’s “I am mad like hell, and I won’t take it anymore”).
Maybe, I will find my true self hidden behind what’s being reflected in front of me, day in and day out. I wonder if those time wasters were served up to collect eye balls, ours included. It’s intended that those “personalized” data were pushed there to hook me. They are there to sell me to sponsors, the same way traditional media have done for years since the day we were born.
Born to “amuse ourselves to death”.
Thang Nguyen 555 