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Do you care?
The network is the computer. We're always on all the time. Chips are embedded into our appliances and they all talk to each other over the network. What you grew up with -- a stand-alone PC that's a private word processor and number cruncher, a fancy typewriter and adding machine -- is an anachronism.
Our privacy is long gone, but the implications are just occurring to many well-intentioned citizens who gave it up in the 1970's and 1980's without realizing it. Large networked computers owned by large corporations offered low prices and amazing services like ATMs. These proprietary networks owned by your bank, your credit card company, your doctor, your insurer, and your school have been giving Big Brother all the information he would ever need. Your shoppers club card takes care of the rest. We don't even have to get into the various governments and the law'n'order efficiencies that they traded citizens for their privacy during the 1980's. Fingerprint and photograph your child -- it's for his own safety. You can hardly walk into a store or drive through a downtown street corner without a surveillance camera at the ready. Those cameras were networked long ago.
Fighting to preserve your privacy is no longer an option. The battle is already lost. You can either get over it or you can live alone in a cabin in Montana and grow your own food.
The Internet had nothing to do with your loss of privacy, though it's being blamed by those who are just waking up and need a scapegoat. Quite the contrary. Compared to the private proprietary networks, the Internet is a public, world-wide, open-standards network that routes around damage: the corporations and governments who want to keep secrets and keep control. Listen to them:
the
mass marketer who can't understand why no one remembers billboards
the
professors who are afraid someone will steal their ideas if they put their
lectures online.
the
copyright lawyers who claim the death of music if the record companies don't get
paid. Their ancestors probably claimed campfires would be the death of
storytelling.
Once upon a time, families formed clans and clans formed villages and villages grew into towns. Why? The benefits outweighed the advantages. Communities, cooperation, the common weal.
If you want a lack of privacy, try living in a small village. Everyone is born and dies in the same house and no one ever travels more than a dozen miles away. That's how most humans lived for the past 40,000 years and most still do today.
That society based on atoms -- geography, real estate, property, ownership of things -- isn't going anywhere. Wars and lawsuits will still be fought. Layered atop that society, we're building communities of shared interest and information based on bits, binary pulses of light frequencies.
If you're willing to share online, that is, if you're willing to give information, then you will receive information. As we've seen throughout the Toolkit, the Web is full of services that we find useful. In this Webtop section, we're going to look at services that didn't quite fit anywhere else. They will give a sense of where we're headed. Keep in mind that we're at the very beginning of figuring out what to do with this public network. We can't yet imagine how it's going to change our grandchildren's lives.
doing
useful, time-saving, productive, and fun stuff online
Web browser
some plug-ins
some
software applications to be downloaded and installed
Learn more about online communities at Port 80's Boardwalk, especially the Net Culture page.
Learn much more at Google.
| make a banner ad |
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make a logo |
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make a music mash |
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make a date social networks |
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make a map to your party |
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make a graph |
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make a print brochure |
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make a js newsfeed |
News / blog Feed Reader / aggregator
This program runs on your computer. When you're online, it
collects news and information from news sites, weblogs, and other online
information sources, and presents everything to you in a single interface.
That makes browsing for news much faster and easier than visiting one site
after another.
nontechnical introduction to newsreaders and RSS
by Dan Gillmor
others:
Gizmos, Inc., Lab's In the Loop
Constructing a survey is as simple as selecting a template and responding to a few questions, selecting your audience, and pressing "Go."
Free Loader -- Web Cam viewing utility
It allows you to enter the URL of a webcam graphic and will automatically reload it for you at a given interval.
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backflip - save and organize Web page in a folder online
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