Privacy??? Public Life???

The article this morning in the New York Times Magazine about living a public life online is worth reading and thinking about. I like that it showed some of the problems of being "overexposed", but didn't BLAST having an online presence totally.

There is something compelling about writing what you are thinking and possibly having others read and comment on it. It is also compelling to read what others are saying and comment on their thoughts.

My position on this is not totally clear. I use my real name online. If you "Google" me you will find lots of stuff online. I pretty much think that anyone can find out just about anything about me if they want to online.... and I doubt that they want to. I know people who write reckless and crazy things online and I am not totally concerned that it will ruin their lives. I think that the coming generations not demand that everyone always be a certain way and not assume that everything they read online is absolutely true.... What do you think?

More changes to the way we think-Our Brains?

I just got done catching up on one of my favorite blogs, the Blue Skunk Blog, by Doug Johnson. In one of the posts he points to the video below. It is mostly about how much time we as a society are spending TV and how the producing and sharing that the Internet allows changes how we spend our time. But, the thing that struck me was his last story which I will paraphrase here. If you want to hear his more elegant presentation of it please watch the video.

A four year old was watching TV with her dad. About 20 minutes into the show she went behind the TV and started looking through all of the cables. Her Dad thought that maybe she was looking for Dora and thought it was cute, so he asked her what she was doing. Her answer shocked him. "I'm looking for the mouse".

She just assumed that she could interact with the media in front of her!! Along with having more than one life and trying to cut and paste as a solution to a problem other than editing in word here is another way that technology is changing how we think about what we can do and what we should be able to do.

I think that there are positive and negative things that come from these changes. How about you?

Second and Third Lives?

Yesterday when I was swimming I was thinking that I must be entering the dreaded middle age crisis because I was lamenting the fact that a person really CAN'T do it over again. If things didn't turn out the way you really hoped that they would with raising your kids you can't just have babies again and do it over. Those kids are now facing their own problems and having to work through them and it just can't be fixed.

That was when it occurred to me that we have had a major change in the way we think about these things in the last 15 years or so. Starting when my kids were in elementary school the whole idea that you could store extra lives and then die many times, trying over and over again to succeed entered into our thoughts. Do young people now realize too late that they cannot redo the years that they partied and wasted time? Is that why marriages don't last as long as they used to? What do you think?