Zombification by technology

Technology turns people in to zombies. All uni students love sleep, but how many of us actually get enough? what with our busy social lives, jobs and studies people struggle to get enough shuteye nowadays. Insomnia is an ever increasing problem amongst the youth of today, how many times have you lain in bed late at night, restless, struggling to sleep and then find youself on your laptop? It is important for us as youths to get as much sleep as possible because when we enter the workforce for real sleep will be at a premium anyways and our obsession with social networking sites is setting us up with bad habits! Since we are the what they call "digital natives" the issue of sleep deprivation is more important for us than generations before since our relationship with technology is more commited than any other relationships. So here are some helpful tips to get you to sleep instead of getting on facebook:

1. Exercise! exercise is good way to burn off all the unused energy stored in your body, you dont need to do much go for a walk or something at the very least the fresh air will actually be good for you. You never sleep as well as when you are tired.

2. Read (a book). This is also a good way to stimulate your mind and get that sucker to do some work. Nothing beats the aestheic of reading from a book, stories are constructed specifically to entertain and inform the reader. So forget Mary's latest status and read a book. Worst comes to worst the book will be so boring you'll fall asleep anyways. Its a win/win situation!

3. Turn off your laptop when youre done with it. Laptops can go days on end without actually being turned off. Im pretty sure for some of you the last time yours was actually off was when you forgot to charge it. Leaving you laptop on at all times encourges people to believe they have unfinished business with their laptops which is disturbing all on its own.

4. If your insomnia means you are getting 3 or 4 hours of sleep a night then you need to distance yourself from your personal techs. Keep your cellphone, iPod and laptop out of your room when you go to bed,this will be a little harder to achieve at first this might seem a little extreme but it is a useful habit to have.

As much as we'd like to believe technology and humans have not (yet) evolved to be the perfect cyborg being. If you can seperate yourself from technology during the evening, your social life will not suffer. Dont turn in to a zombie, distance yourself from technology it will be there when you wake up!

Technologys affect on society.

Every year technology is growing and every year we are developing a closer relationship to it. Sometimes this aspect frightens me.

Society is becoming so heavily affected by technology it is hard not to imagine a future dominated by it. People are already being defined as ‘cyborgs’. Firstly I rejected this, But after careful consideration I finder it truer than I would like. Society is now so dependent on certain devices, to live without the internet or a cell phone would be a struggle. These technologies have become extensions of ourselves - they are now natural. Personally, I like to think I could survive without a phone but in all honesty it would just be a huge inconvenience.

Our days are dictated by the forces of technology. Habit controls our attachment to it. I wake up and my mobile is the first thing I check. Laptops and social networking sites are so much a part of our lives, there seems to be a decreasing option to go without.

It is very noticeable catching the train every morning how attached to technologies we are. It is no longer heard of to just spark up a conversation with a stranger sitting next to you - it is almost annoying if someone does. Instead we whip out our phones, iPods or laptops and remove ourselves from society. We immerse ourselves in our own world.

I find this aspect sad. Although we are socialising in other ways, i hope we are not becoming insociable at the same time. I love technology but cyborg seems so extreme.
I think being less reliant on technology would be liberating. But the necessity is also increasing. Making it harder and harder to do so. I guess we cannot turn back now?

Fine print will be the end of us all.

Companies like Apple and Microsoft have put teams and large amounts of money into their privacy policies, terms of agreement (ToA) and end-user license agreement (EULA) but does anybody even spend the time to read the fine print?. Most of us just click accept and move on without caring what we’ve just agreed too.

A recent April fools prank by UK game website Gamestation has highlighted how easily users and buyers will accept a company’s EULA. Gamestation did this by claiming thousands of their customers souls with an addition to their ToA and EULA on April 1st. The "Immortal Soul Clause" states that "By placing an order via this Web site on the first day of the fourth month of the year 2010 Anno Domini, you agree to grant Us a non transferable option to claim, for now and for ever more, your immortal soul." An estimated 7,500 customers handed over their souls to Gamestation through this clause when purchasing items online.

When commenting on this prank Gamestation claimed they used the clause to illustrate problems with ToA, privacy polices and EULA’s as ways for companies to hide unfavorable polices from their customers. Figures from this incident report 88 % of people who bought products that day didn’t read the small print. 12 % of people did notice the trick in the clause and were given a 5 £ gift certificate and were entered in a draw for a game prize pack. When news of this prank hit the media Gamestation graciously gave back the souls they had in their ‘possession’

So next time you click accept on a companies EULA without reading the fine print, just be careful, you might be making a deal with the devil

13 years, The Age of Adulthood?

I thought I would delve a little deeper into the motivations behind the ‘global’ 13 year old age restriction against accessing to online databases, forums and social networks.

At first glance it seems the purpose of the safety restriction is to prevent ‘children’ from accessing sites that are socially unacceptable or dangerous; pornography sites and other X-rated materials. Those 13 years old and above are entitled to because they have passed ‘childhood’ and hence mature enough to access these sites.

But remember what you were like at 13? Most likely a socially unaware, immature child. Big kids were 16 and adults were only good for candy money. So why does this restriction exist?
The age restriction has roots in US law. The Children's Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998 was created because parents wanted to safeguard the personal details of children to prevent ‘certain companies’ from collecting and selling their details.

Its stated purpose is “to protect children from micro-targeting by advertisers and to minimize the potential for contact with dangerous individuals through chat rooms, e-mail, and bulletin boards by involving parents in kids' on-line activities.”

Children are allowed to give out information with parental permission but most websites just prevent access all together due to the amount of paper work involved

So what seems like an interesting meme, a hilariously wrong and repeated judgement of a 13 year olds temperament, is actually a boring law that dominates the Western online world as a consequence of the US internet monopoly.

Erm...Do I know you?

The recent lecture on social media lecture really got me thinking about my nature of my Facebook friends. Sure, a majority of them I know personally in real life. But the Dunbar number left me contemplating how many people I'm really close with. A sign of the times: nearly everyone I know is on Facebook; my family, friends, longlost childhood friends, everyone bar my doctor and employer (for obvious reasons). This prompted me to 'take stock' of my Facebook connections and attempt to quantify and evaluate these connections. Here's what I came up with.

-517 Friends in Total
-Approximately 400 of these are 'real' friends from university/school/work
-70 are friends of friends or what would be considered 'acquaintances'
-20 of them are family members
-13 of these are randoms I have never met before

Of these 13 randoms, I only talk to one of them on a regular basis, a guy from Cairo who added me randomly and who I talk to about anything and everything. Periodically, I try to do 'friend purges'. That is, I try to expel any connections on Facebook that are not representative of a connection that exists in real life (bar the 13 'randoms').

So, any overwhelming majority of my online connections are representative of real life connections. But does that make these connections any more legitimate than say, pen pals? Before the internet, having pen lals was a popular method of having a friendship with someone despite geographical distance. Is communicating with a random Facebooker (i.e. 'no mutual friends' type deal) the new 'pen pal'? This, too, got me thinking about a dystopian future, about an oppressive State where people could not leave their houses and the only meaningful relationships that did exist were facilitated through an online medium. Surely this won't happen, but a scary thought nonetheless! What do you guys think?

How private is private?

Subscribing to anything in South Korea requires a national identity along with highly descriptive imformation about oneself. However, little do we know about what happens to our information and how 'private' our information becomes.

Cyber world is becoming more and more a part of our daily lives. The number of internet shopping malls has been growing vastly, and Koreans go as far as buying house hold items such as soap or toothpaste through the internet. As popularity of these websites inclines little are we aware of the also inclining risks of our private information being exposed.

Two years ago when my friend was visitng me in New Zealand, we got a phoen call from her mother worried to death. Apparently 20 minutes ago a strange man had rung her up saying that he had my friend captured and he demanded money to be posted into his account. It's funny because he even had a girl crying in the background, desperately crying out for mum. Later when my friend's dad investigated the case, the girl crying in the background was a recording and websites were selling personal information to people at a very low price. This incident occurred a number of times in Korea. Motheres were often rung up at home when their children were to be at school or cram schools and worried mothers would often pay the desired amount of money, only to find their daughters knowing nothing about the incident.

These kinds of incidents do make me wonder how private our private information is kept? Websites promise security of our personal information but are these promises really being kept? As correspoding contact between humans and cyberspace increases, what used to be termed private is no longer considered private. So to what extent is our private information being kept private?