Future social media could be the new “one small step for mankind”

My dad once told me how important it was for his generation to see humans walk on the moon. He believed that that single event would change the world forever, and humans would stop stupid things like war and poverty from continuing to happen because it wasn’t Americans on the moon, but citizens on Earth. That helped make the world just a little bit smaller.

The Internet has been billed as being able to do something similar as well. Since the Internet belongs to everyone and no one, the ability to tell six billion different stories exists. The power of a computer, a connection and an ISP can link millions of people together in interconnected social networks. The richest man on the planet could find the poorest man in a chat room, and a sharing of experiences could happen, and perhaps both people could leave that room with new outlooks on life. These two people would probably never find each other in the “real” world, which is much more controlled and distant.

 

This is what makes Manuel Castells’ argument about competing networks so interesting. He wrote that we shouldn’t complain about corporate controls, but network controls.

“This is why to counter networks of power and their connections, alternative networks need to be introduced; networks that disrupt certain connections and establish new ones, such as disconnecting political institutions from the business-dominated media and re-anchoring them in civil society through horizontal communication networks. Networks versus networks.”

In order for the dreams of my father’s generation, and my dream of an open and free Internet to stay alive, we need to start developing alternate networks outside the current mediated systems. I have heard people say that the Internet is only the beginning of the future. Soon, we may not even need a computer to access information – there could be chips placed in our heads that allow us to access every library in the world at a second’s notice or watch a TV show without ever turning on the TV. Ultimately, maybe we’ll have transporters that can take us to any part of the world within seconds. The world will dramatically shrink and the need for borders would cease to exist.

 

There is value in making the world smaller, but at what cost? We could lose a great deal of privacy, as we are seeing now with the vast amount of information people post on sites like myspace and facebook. I just hope that no matter how much privacy we give up, the future still stays bright and the problems will be solved, just like my father hoped when those men first stepped on the moon “for all mankind.”

 

 

Questions:

1. What do you think will be the future of personal privacy as more aspects of our lives go online?
2. What’s the next big thing to take off in regards to social media/the online world?