[Air-L] viral reality? "We have met Big Brother and he is us."

[Alex Randall]

Back in the 1980's we wondered how computers would ever get to be really useful because we would need millions of programmers to write all the code.We did not foresee that Lotus 1-2-3 would turn millions of us into programmers and we wrote millions of codes.

 
In the early 90's we wondered how e-commerce would ever take off unless millions of people became proficient at buying on line and trusting strangers. Then eBay and Amazon and PayPal made billions of people into e-commerce buyers and sellers.
 

In the early years of the last decade we were wondering how Big Government could co-opt the Internet and turn it into a tool to monitor all citizens. Now we have Facebook and Twitter where we all report and display our private activities to everyone.

 

"We have met Big Brother and he is us." (Nod to Pogo Possum. )

 

Everyone is a reporter, everyone is a writer and everyone is a photographer.

And we are all reporting on everything we do - which is a bonanza for anyone who wants to look into our private lives.