While our technology and products have become increasingly advanced, any sense of quality and value has started to come apart in the relentless product cycle. This cycle–an insistence on new and better–has infected our media and minds as well. In our movement further into the digital frontier, we have started to leave permanence behind in favor of freshness, depth in favor of convenience. We are in danger of losing a certain fundamental sense of meaning.

There is an argument made against privacy that says someone who isn’t engaged in criminal behavior has nothing to hide. This method of thinking allowed the US government to slowly sap away our civil liberties in the wake of the 9/11 attacks–many have just accepted that trading privacy for security is acceptable and used the “nothing to hide” argument to rationalize what was, essentially, a decision based on fear. However, limiting the government’s ability to intrude in our private lives is easy compared with attempting to control how personal information spreads on the internet via gossip. Rather than spies or wiretaps, gossip is often gathered by those we trust and spread online by people who don’t understand or appreciate the potential for the damage it can do. In reality, privacy is about much more than concealing wrongdoing.

Internet-based abuse (‘cyberbullying’) and privacy / relationship issues are still massively misunderstood. The complexities of online sociality are probably the biggest ‘generational divide’ between modern teens and adults. To help put it in perspective a bit, here are some numbers…

Wired picked up a story yesterday on a lawsuit in Florida dealing with the emerging legal issue of ‘cyberbullying.’ Reading this, I think there is a gap that new law should seek to fill–a law addressing defamatory opinions when wielded against a citizen in an international context when that citizen is not otherwise newsworthy.

More and more teens pour out their hearts into the digital blackness and spend their time with socially networked acquaintances. Secrets that they would hate for their parents to see are only a Google search away. In a digital world designed around speed, convenience, and ego, they will loose a sense of what constitutes a strong relationship and their ability to empathize will suffer. At a time when it is easier than ever to find a reason to hate someone, they will be more likely than ever to be willing to hate. How can we–as parents, as developers, as netizens–put a stop to this progression?

‘Did You Know?’ also known as ‘Shift Happens’ is a thought-provoking video presenting facts and figures loosely themed around globalization and the information age. This is the latest iteration, rumored to have been improved from the original by Sony BMG for an executive meeting they held recently in Rome.

‘Hard words break no bones’ is a phrase that has been in use since the Renaissance, but things may be changing. Teens are putting a great deal of value into terms: names, labels, and the power of specialized language. In a world built entirely on words, the old adage is being revised: sticks and stones will never hurt you, but words may break your heart.

The Future of Reputation by Daniel Solove
Description [from Amazon]:
Teeming with chatrooms, online discussion groups, and blogs, the Internet offers previously unimagined opportunities for personal expression and communication. But there’s a dark side to the story. A trail of information fragments about us is forever preserved on the Internet, instantly available in a Google search. A [...]

In the last two months, both Seth Godin and Paul Boutin have announced the death of blogs. The most damning symptom, they say, is the weak showing of single-author blogs in the Technorati top 100 list and the growing interest in micro-blogging and social networking platforms like Twitter, Pownce, and Facebook. The web is changing, becoming faster and more social, but that’s no reason to bury your blog. Here are five ways your blog can thrive in the next few years.

[...] The best way for me to innovate and enjoy what I do is to go native. Time to slip into the digital tribe and move among its peoples—virtual, 3D hands brushing in the darkness of social networked second lives, a million onymous youth dancing hyper-textualy into the night, the thrumming of drum and bass shared via mapped music genomes, and the twinkling glow of liquid-crystal-pixels offering up the entire geo-positioned world like an altar to a social, multi-cultural, semantic, hive-minded, Mercurial GOD.

From ‘A Softer World’

There is an argument made against privacy that says someone who isn’t engaged in criminal behavior has nothing to hide. This method of thinking allowed the US government to slowly sap away our civil liberties in the wake of the 9/11 attacks–many have just accepted that trading privacy for security is acceptable and used the “nothing to hide” argument to rationalize what was, essentially, a decision based on fear. However, limiting the government’s ability to intrude in our private lives is easy compared with attempting to control how personal information spreads on the internet via gossip. Rather than spies or wiretaps, gossip is often gathered by those we trust and spread online by people who don’t understand or appreciate the potential for the damage it can do. In reality, privacy is about much more than concealing wrongdoing.

Internet-based abuse (‘cyberbullying’) and privacy / relationship issues are still massively misunderstood. The complexities of online sociality are probably the biggest ‘generational divide’ between modern teens and adults. To help put it in perspective a bit, here are some numbers…

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