Musings on Internet Privacy and the Future

An idea just popped into my head, as these things do.

We all know the world is getting smaller, and that privacy is undergoing some very interesting changes. Facebook, Youtube, twitter, silly reality shows that follow people around 24/7, everyone has a cellphone nowadays. And sure, many quip about how socializing over a screen is not the same as face to face, and that might be true, but socializing with someone over a screen is better than not socializing at all.

Clearly, people are more connected to each other at present than at any point in history.

Let's say peoples' private lives do become progressively more public. Initially, you'll see people losing jobs over embarrassing stuff that winds up on Facebook (as is already happening). But, since the amount of stupid stuff people do is fairly constant, and the amount of privacy is decreasing continually, eventually employers will have to become more tolerant or just desensitized to this, else the workforce will get dramatically thinner. Now, I'm the last person to condone stupid behavior - I hate stupid people, but beyond just being an arse, there is a whole range of quirky, odd, strange, playful, embarrassing, and emotional things that are woven into the fabric of being human.

What you are seeing is more exposure to these different perspectives, and I think people will develop a broader grasp of, "Hey, even though we're different in so many ways, we're really not all that different."

Feeling the Future - Have Scientist Found Evidence for Precognition?

Have scientists finally found replicable evidence for psychic phenomena? A social psychologist at Cornell University has conducted a series of experiments that reveal the brain may be able to anticipate future events.

Dr. Daryl Bem, a social psychologist at Cornell University, has tested over 1000 participants in nine experiments that test for retroactive, or "time-reversed," influence. In other words, the brain is reacting to events before they happen. Precognition used to be in the domain of science fiction, mutants, and superheroes, but there may be truth behind the myth. Fifty years ago, this notion was utterly unthinkable; however recent experiments in quantum mechanics are challenging our view of time and space. The effect may not be large enough to give you tomorrow’s winning lottery numbers, but experiments like this may lead the path to new discoveries in neuroscience, cognition, and consciousness research.

This is not the first time Dr. Daryl Bem has garnered attention for his parapsychology experiments. In 1994, he, along with Charles Honorton, published an analysis on the Ganzfeld experiments, one of the strictest protocols to test for the existence of telepathy. Parapsychology often gets a bad rap from mainstream science; however its experimental methodology has improved dramatically since its inception in the late 19^th century. Long gone are the days of playing cards with funny symbols on them, modern parapsychology experiments are conducted with computer systems and sophisticated equipment.

Suggested Reading:

Psychology Today: Have Scientists Finally Discovered Evidence for Psychic Phenomena!?

Bem, D. J. (in press) Feeling the Future: Experimental evidence for anomalous retroactive influences on cognition and affect. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.