Tales Of The Gurrier

So I found the brain crippled masturbator. The ‘come hither’ invitations and salacious emails from spam robots and nascent serial killers piling up in my inbox drove me to it. I was forced to lower myself into the internet bathtub of filth to rectify the situation.

So what did I find out? Well, lean on the internet a little and it’ll fold like a cheap suit, sing like a canary and rollover and beg. With two pieces of information, a nickname, a location and Google I learned the young gentleman is 23 years old, he hails from Canada, I found his hometown, his full name, his Flickr account, pictures of his family, his girlfriend, pets, motorcycles, car, new house. Where he attended college, social clubs he belongs too, and much more. The internet gave it all up in five minutes.

As this torrent of information flowed out onto the screen, I thought, ‘Blimey, that was a bit too easy. Now what?’ Well, now nothing really. The guy entered an incorrect email address into a random social networking site. It could as easily have been a Pigeon Fanciers network or a medieval reenactment society, or an ebay account. The fact that is was a sex site meant I was initially a little disturbed, thinking it may have been done maliciously.

I imagine incidents like this are prevalent nowadays and can only increase. Hysterical reports about cyberstalking and identity theft aside, the concept of personal privacy is undergoing a vast sea change. When every digitally connected individual in the first world has a page or an account on a social network somewhere, how will that impact on our concept of personal privacy? So much hot air is blown about regarding the web it’s difficult tell if it really is socially and culturally significant or merely a byproduct of an overheated, overhyped 21st Century version of Tulip-mania.

The truth, as ever, is likely some median line within the miasma hanging over the web. Conspiracy buffs may believe in shadowy government agencies mining our personal data to keep tabs on the populace, but personally my experience of governments is they are far too incompetent to accurately sustain such a vast undertaking. No, I fear some global mega-corporation creating an uber-database from all the information we freely offer up to the internet. Some killer app formed from mutated Facebook/Myspace/Bebo/Flickr/YouTube/Netflix/Amazon plugins, sucking down information from the World Wide Web and funneling it into the hands of marketing executives bent on hollowing out the soul of the world.

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 5th, 2007 at 1:47 pm and is filed under Bloggery. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.