A throwback

I am a late bloomer when it comes to technology. Well, I'm a late bloomer in a lot of ways, but for the purposes of this post, I am something of a techno throwback. When it comes to my computer, my cellphone, or my iPod, I know how to do what I need to do and that's it. (Though I must say that I'm proud that, thanks to my iTouch, I can now use the term "app" as if I have always used it.) I rarely check FB, and I don't tweet. So when faced with the blogging assignment, I was initially reluctant but am coming to accept it; I have not, however, crossed over to enjoying, as a post on "Why Blog?" put it, "dialoging with strangers." I have trouble with the basic premise that total strangers are interested in what I have to say, partly because I'm not interested in what they have to say. (Well, that sounds more extreme than I mean it to be...)

This brings me to a segment of video "The Machine is Us/ing Us." Not quite three minutes in comes the question, "Who will organize all of this data?" The answer: "We will. You will." As a former newspaper person, I find this frightening. This is not a new idea, and it's undoubtedly one reason why newspapers--i.e., the old media-- are in trouble, but a key challenge as more and more people get their information online is the notion of a filter. Where is the objective arbiter of all this information? Why should we trust random strangers as sources of information? This is why I have trouble with "crowdsourcing" stories. This is why Wikipedia cannot be relied upon as the sole source of information.

But I digress. I should point out that the video went on to say "We'll need to rethink a few things (copyright, authorship, ethics, privacy).." What the creator means by that, though, is not at all clear.