The Trade-offs...

I remember back in 1990s when I was not this much wired, I enjoyed the time hanging out with friends without glancing at a smart-phone. I still remember waiting for a phone call from my friend in London in the middle of a night (and those moments still linger in my memory). Also, it was almost impossible to find static(?) web presence of  my real-life friends on the Internet, unless the friend was a geek with a developed website of her/his own.

Now, checking e-mails more than fourteen times a day, sending hundreds of text messages per month, twitting, facebooking (with all the friends around the world), updating the profile on linked in... now I think: "Is my life enriched by all the information?"

There are things that definitely benefit people.  I wait metro less than before. It is easier to locate an address. I feel more connected to the world. We have all kinds of mobile apps making our lives (in a way) easier...

However, I believe that most of the things are double edged swords. According to an e-mail statistics report, average number of corporate e-mail that one person receives per day is 75 (in 2010).  Seventy-Five "corporate" e-mails every single day per person!!! Some people may receive more than the average, and we all have to do "something" to clean up the inbox.

On social media platforms, everybody is following each other... we all know who is doing what. Also, some smart phones can trace our digital footprints and can tell what we were doing at certain time of a certain day. Not only we are busy updating ourselves and others, we are spending considerable amount of time doing all that, there also is practically no privacy.

Recently, "the right to be deleted" is discussed and also, in Europe, a new law(so called "cookie law") allows people to opt out cookies.  Will the U.S. give its citizens and taxpayers the right to be deleted in the near future? I don't want people to see my silly pictures after my death. Don't we also have right to be anonymous sometimes?

Here is an interesting posting explaining how our privacy is being sold with/without our knowledge.:

Beware of Lollipops from Strange Websites!

Are Social Media Monitoring Mainstream Media?

Are Social Media Monitoring Mainstream Media???

Maybe in part... ????
What I believe is that most of the social media can start stirring up certain issues, but one of the most critical leverage is still the mainstream media; major news channels, news papers, and so on.

(Benkler - from http://benkler.org/Face.html)

Even thought Benkler argues that blogs and other on-line media can do the role of the watchdog... (and he has pretty optimistic view... look at him in the picture! He looks very optimistic!! lol) well... even in his book, The Wealth of Networks, it is apparent that mainstream media played a critical role to leverage the movements. (Look at the graph on page 224 for Sinclair case and the diagram on page 234 for Diebold case of this pdf file (chapter 7 only).)

Not only in Benkler's book, but also in many other cases, mainstream media play more important roles than what we assume. Think about Occupy Wall street, Occupy DC, and some other incidents... although those cases were well known in the social media world, what if it was NEVER picked up by any of the mainstream media?

I believe it is hard to ignore when a majority of people get to know some events/incidents, but there still will be a huge difference depending on weather the event is picked up by major media outlets or not...

This may change, but for now, blogs and other social media outlets can be a source of news, but I wonder if they can really replace any the current mainstream media in the near future...

Just a thought. I may keep looking into this and write a paper????
Any other thoughts??