I have really enjoyed my experience of being 'back in school' thus far. I've always had a curious mind and enjoyed learning new things. My biggest reason for going back were twofold. One, I wanted to learn if what I thought I already new about e-business and social media was applied in the right way to my business (Walking Holiday Ireland) and secondly I really looked forward (and enjoy) discussing these topics with lecturers and fellow students.
I am hoping to see more debates in the second semester. I feel I learn most from other students and discussing (conflicting) viewpoints than from a book or powerpoint presentation.
I am dreading the exams as I am not someone who enjoys or does well in the classical exam scenario. But hey, we will give it our best shot. I am looking forward to semester II already!
Up to quite recently one of the topics that we would talk about as regularly as the weather and football results would be the incredible developments in technology. In my relatively short lifetime we have gone from; using a typewriter and licking a stamp to Twitter and from getting up from the sofa to change the t.v. channel to streaming on-demand video from our phone to our 52" led t.v. or indeed watching HD cinema on our tablet.
When we were young
I remember raising my eyebrows and grunting, like only an 13 year old can, because my grandparents could not grasp the concept of recording one of three channels on their VHS video recorder. And now I am equally frustrated when my 11 yr old son asks for a youtube account and I have to google whether (and how) I can set one up safely.
What technology has done between, let's say, 1960 and now, media has done in just the last 10 years. I believe the first real milestone was the iPod. And when you wonder why it took so long for the walkman to be replaced you have to look at the progression of the data storage used and the road from analogue to digital. Once we decided that we wanted to carry music around with us again we started looking at what other digital media we could store on mobile devices. This hunger for data to be portable and easily accessible cumulated into the smartphone of today.
The smartphone however added another dimension, that of communication of course, but not only the communication between people in the traditional sense of the phone, more importantly the transfer of data between portable devices. This meant that we no longer have to synchronise our iPod or smartphone at home but we could refresh and get the latest information on the go, wherever we are.
From Kilobytes to Terabytes
As a matter of fact behind a lot of these examples you need to understand the revolution of data storage in general. It is the economy of scale behind data storage that is driving the current trends. For example; today a 2TB drive the size of a pocket book would cost you 66 euro. In 1995 the same amount of data would have to be stored on 2 million 3.5" floppy disks at, let's say, 1 euro each.
While getting incredibly more successful in cramming huge amount of data in tiny devices we also revolutionised the amount of data we can send over the airwaves at a very low cost.
We feed our own hunger
It is the industries ability to both increase our data efficiency and our drive to do so at an ever decreasing cost that we as consumers continue to grow hungrier and greedier for more. Besides the major changes in the technology itself we have also seen a seismic shift in the sociological aspects of how we use it. Where we used to rely on established media conglomerates to provide us with the information we received we now increasingly create and shape that media ourselves. Indeed we do this as part of our everyday lives by 'Liking', commenting, Plus 1'ing and tweeting.
Let's slow down and look up
We now use consume, create and share media in more ways than we could ever have predicted only a short few years ago. On a daily basis we continually re-invent our uses of media and technology and this has happened at such an (alarming) pace that, as a global community, we have not had the time to think or review how we feel about this revolution of sorts. I nearly wish we could slow ourselves down for a while so that we can review the good and the bad and create a roadmap for the future which is not only safe for our children but makes this digital age a better place for all of us.
When Sarah a 14-year-old Dutch girl (aka @queendementriax_ on Twitter). tweeted a bomb threat to American Airlines a few weeks ago she didn't realise the consequences of her actions.
Her twitter account was disconnected on Sunday night the 20th of April 2014 (so there is no point in checking her account) shortly after she gained 20,000 followers, and 15 minutes of internet fame.
Here is a quick recap of what happened...
Sarah: “@AmericanAir hello my name’s Ibrahim and I’m from Afghanistan. I’m part of Al Qaida and on June 1st I’m gonna do something really big bye.”
American Airlines: “@queendemetriax_ Sarah, we take these threats very seriously. Your IP Address and details will be forwarded to security and the FBI.”
Sarah: “@AmericanAir pls pls pls can I do something to make it good pls I’m so scared I’m just a 14 year old white girl I’m not a terrorist pls.”
she later tweeted that she was very "sorry" and her desire to be famous was for different reasons; “but I meant like Demi Lovato famous, not Osama bin laden famous”.
She was later arrested and her mugshot taken by the police in Rotterdam.
Parenting the online generation
My first reaction to this was that she was a very silly girl but I soon started to feel sorry for her and more so her parents. In recent times I have given a lot of thought about my responsibilities as a parent of a twelve and 8 year old to educate and guide them in an online world. I am still struggling with what path to take and how to approach this as it is a parenting mine field.
We are getting weekly if not daily requests for accounts to be set up on Youtube, Facebook, twitter, snapchat etc. etc. etc. The list is literally endless and changes as regularly and quickly as the weather here in Ireland and is driven by what is the flavour of the week on the school playground.
How can we keep our children safe and prevent them from making these guffaws, we no longer just need to consider how to keep them safe in our house, on our streets and in the schoolyard but we now need to protect them from a global online community and it's police force.
Anyway my parental journey on the treacherous path as the guardian of an online child is worth an entirely new blog perhaps.
I didn't give Sarah and her story much more thought until a few days later when the news channels reported that Twitter was 'on fire' with hundreds of your twitterers tweeting to her defence and protesting by posting similar bomb-threats. I thought this was quite amusing and at the same time quite ingenious. I mean are the police / FBI and Interpol now going to have to arrest all these teen-twitter-anarchists? Surely not!
It also makes you think about why law enforcement agencies are so Gung-ho about going after these cyber threats? I mean, what is the harm of a Dutch 14yr old girl saying something 'silly' on twitter? Do we really have to believe that the FBI etc are looking at twitter for the next terrorist threat and rely on social media to be forewarned and take preemptive action? And if so is going after the Sarahs of this world with prison sentences justified to keep Twitter 'clean' from jokers and only allow real terrorists to make real threats!?
Are we, as an online community and people, to be policed in that way?
What's the harm?
We all know and understand (i hope) that Law Enforcement agencies use supercomputers to crawl the interweb for keywords that are associated with threatening and / or terrorist behaviour. So tweets like Sarah's are picked up quickly and actioned by the police. But what if we all tweeted such threats on a daily basis? Would these supercomputers start overheating and combust with digital excitement? Would the world be a better place for not having the NSA looking over our digital shoulder? Or would we jeapordise innocent lives because the next tweet from an actual terrorist is now hidden amongst those from Demi Lovato fans?
