Another life in the land of the living.

It’s strange to watch the world as it watches me.  As I track the sites and published services that expose bits and pieces of the vague thoughts that I have and their connections to one another, my interest is peaked in the patterns that people have been making.  Some dig hard and come in to different sites from many different angles.  Some dig lightly and seek out links diligently.  Others simply get into the story and allow their interested minds to step from chapter to chapter in the straight and logical paths that I created for them.

The thoughts that the world reads will affect their thoughts, what they might write, and who they might communicate with in the future.  My words will reverberate in their minds when we meet in person whether we speak or not.  They may even attempt to validate concepts by tapping the same tree from different sides as they interact with the sources of data that I have published, that others have published, and that in-person meetings will confirm.

Catching their thoughts, watching their self-published nodes develop, and listening to their questions with my publishings in mind has shown me an exhausting, but interesting, interconnected web of information both online and off.  Equally as interesting is the corruptibility of this web.

What I’m writing now, who I’d like to become, how I tailor and order search results for consumption, the ease with which linear pathways can be generated, and the raw power of building a page-turner for the masses can create any persona, perception, and interpretation of fact or fiction so long as the source can be “validated”.  One thing that I’ve come to notice is that people are becoming increasingly believing of online sources, and younger generations will strongly believe something to be true so long as it is seen from two or three points of view even if all points of view look at publications based on the same source.

It’s as if an onlooker notices you are holding something behind your back and queries, “What are you holding?”  You are holding a piece of candy, but you respond, “I have a piece of paper in my hands.”  The onlooker is inclined to believe you, but they approach from a different angle and ask more indirectly this time.

It’s a different day of the week in a different location, and you turn your front to them still holding the candy behind your back as you respond with the same answer.  Later, the first onlooker runs into a second onlooker, who had just asked you the same question, and query whether or not the second onlooker knows what’s behind your back as a tertiary means of confirmation.  The second onlooker responds, with plenty of self-satisfaction from knowing the answer — even though it’s the wrong answer, “It’s a piece of paper.”

Now, the first onlooker has fully confirmed what they know as a fact.  The second onlooker obligated themselves to, and therefor self-imposed belief of, what they now also know to be a fact.  Both onlookers have been fooled.

This is the power of the Information Age.  Whether the onlooker was armed with the correct information or not, the impact was the same.  A networked onslaught of perception became a single reality for multitudes of real people.  The lesson?

Inform responsibly; validate intelligently.

The Social Media bubble is now the awesome superpower of the digitally connected world.  People have become units with statistics and interconnected points of view.  The rumor mill is bigger than ever, and people have already been made and destroyed from the opportunities and disasters that the Internet has paved the way for.  For those of us in the United States, the Internet is largely uncontrolled, and it’s full of corruption just as it is full of good intention leaving plenty of room for concern.

Security is the number one concern for online social networkers with no drop in pressure.  Facebook allows group-by-group highly granular security policies that allow you to show some information to one group of “friends” and other information to another.  MySpace, Google’s many publishable services, and others have similar granular security principals.  They are all digital locks with digital keys leaving the raw exposure of data elephants at the mercy of skilled software engineers.

Who has the keys, who sells the keys, and how powerful are the keys really?  Welcome to what many are deeming Web 3.0.  There are many different definitions for Web 3.0 sometimes including detailed technical algorithms and platforms that have yet to be widely adopted in software and on connected home devices, but the common layman high-level definition is that Web 3.0 is an Internet that capitalizes on the data collected for any one person in a way that allows connected software to tailor your Internet experience accordingly.

Advertisements, people, links, ideas, propaganda, and products that you are shown are those that you are most likely to click, be interested in, or buy.  Web 3.0 can even utilize the data from people you know to help it understand your interests even better.  While this sounds very sheisty, there are several features that can assist us as well.  Knowing your geographical location, connected applications such as Google’s search can help you find doctors, lawyers, or family getaways near you.  With some basic information on your origins, applications such as MySpace and Facebook can reconnect you with long lost friends or members of your family tree.

I don’t think it’s any surprise that the youngest generations were among the first to jump into social media platforms.  Sometimes ignorance is bliss.  With identity theft sitting on the top of the charts today as a world crisis, after years of receiving junk mail, after taking more falls than most of us can count, and stemming from a more private and semi-secretive culture looking out for family interests, it’s no wonder why older generations are much slower and more cautious easing into online persona publishing than many of their children and their children’s children.

The newest generations have been trained early to understand common application user interface design and easily cruise their way through multitudes of connected applications.  They rely on networked technology to communicate on major and minor scales.  New generations friend and de-friend with meaning as well as maintain social circles, rumors, likes, and dislikes all online.  Protecting your child from the risks of the Internet now presents the new issue of raising an anti-social child.  In schools, being connected is now considered the norm.

If a child is disconnected in a public school, they’re asking mom and dad for a cell phone and an e-mail address, because they want to be accepted and they need to be in the know.  They want to stop getting taunted every time they have to give the dreaded “I don’t have an e-mail address.” response to their peers, and they need to be able to stay up to speed on school publications as more schools make more moves to paperless delivery systems.  No child is going to regularly dig through the school website for the latest information in an age where sometimes hundreds of micro information feeds are delivered to them daily.

Latest generations are so unable to disconnect themselves from the social collective that it causes magnitudes of anguish when they are forcibly disconnected.  Not knowing what to do, they become naked and frustrated in anticipation for the moment they can rejoin the collective.  Heaven forbid they try their Twitter attention spans on a board game.

We now have the single largest method of societal corruption and the most efficient system for world unity only a few generations away from being fully grown.  As the greatest swiss army knife that ever was or that may ever be, the single greatest collaborative database of human knowledge, and a gargantuan platform for corruption and misinformation, we are being forced to change the way we think about the Internet.

For now, everything is still young, and there’s nothing more interesting to me than watching this new world develop.  Seeing how people are easily led from one page to another as if they were ordered and bound in a book, watching those who think they are digging diligently be easily fooled into looking at the same side of the same coin dressed in different outfits and presented in indirect ways, and understanding how heavily newer generations have come to rely on the Internet are all observations of only recent developments.  Imagine the future.

~A