New Comm Tech

Part One: Cyberpunk’d

Technology is being recycled by major companies.  It has become a budding industry: helping businesses and people safely discard old machines.  As far as postulating about what one would do with an iron lung, for example, such things haven’t been invented yet so any possible alternative uses are unknown. 

However, a future of people implanted with mircochips and barcodes is certainly a possibility.  Whether or not it would become mandatory is a different story.  If people willingly tagged themselves, life could become easier for them.  They would be potentially safer, find it easier to fly and renew drivers licenses and the likelihood of being a victim of identity theft would decrease.  The concept becomes sinister, though, when one considers the thought of the entire population forcibly being embedded with microchips.

This Orwellian scenario is entirely possible in Australia (from a legal standpoint), as we have no Bill of Rights to safeguard our civil liberties.  Invasive medical procedures being forced onto the public as a way to control us and keep us under the watchful gaze of Big Brother is a scary thought.  Our privacy would be violated even moreso than it is now, with our location and identity being monitored by the government.

Part Two:
1. Social Networking - Weaver, A.C; Morrison, B.B
In the context of today’s electronic media, social networking has come to mean individuals using the Internet and Web applications to communicate in previously impossible ways.
2. Internet Privacy - Lorrie Faith Cranor
A social experiment into the group mentality of people in a real socialible situation compared to that of an online community.
3. Defriending Facebook - Katie Hafner
Studies internet addiction and the power that Web 2.0 services have on shaping the psychology of Gen Y.