No, this is not an article about American patriotism. But by the time this article has been up for a few minutes, the entire world will be able to read it. In this modern, wireless, iPad-enabled cyberculture of ours, we Americans tend to take this unparalleled freedom of information for granted, and no attitude could have more disastrous consequences. Every time we post a picture on FaceBook, or tweet to our heart's content on Twitter, we are basically exposing ourselves to the entire world. This is the same world that contains nations of people who would love nothing better than to see every last American slaughtered. And they have probably voiced their violent sentiments a billion times, but the average American would never know this, because those same angry people don't speak English. Just because HTML, XHTML, XML, and God-knows-how-many-other Internet languages were written in English, that does not mean that the rest of the world now speaks English by default. Americans desperately need to get a clue: the presence of the Internet does NOT mean that everyone is a willing participant in the global village. If anything, some of the cyber-participants are basically cyber-predators. And here you are, throwing your naked butt up in the air for everyone to see, including those same cyber-predators, who could be from anywhere in the world, and I mean anywhere. Here go some scenarios below that should give you pause for thought before you go indiscriminately hanging your naked butt out in cyberspace ever again.
What if you belonged to a strictly orthodox religion (like Christianity, Judaism, or Islam), and for your political science project in college you wrote a detailed blog defending gay and lesbian rights. Now imagine going to your church/synagogue/mosque a few days later and finding that you and your family have been banned from ever having fellowship there again. Then a few days after that, you start getting threatening emails and phone calls from people you don't even know, some of whom live in other cities, other states, or even other countries. But they all have one thing in common: they were deeply and religiously offended by your blog, and they felt that the world would be a much better place without you in it. And who's to say they have to respect the sanctity of human life? If they happen to come from a radically religious nation that firmly believes in the death-penalty for all infidels, then you're basically marked for death. This is one example, a worldwide example, where you really need to think before you speak.
Or how about this one. (I've actually seen this happen in real life.) Let's say that you wrote something heinous and detrimental towards Republicans on your FaceBook page. You've even gone as far as saying, in so many words, that the only good Republican is a dead one. You even went on the warpath and cursed both the Tea Party and the Religious Right with the most graphically violent words possible. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, you go to work that Monday morning and find that you have been fired, without even so much as an explanation. Worse than that, every subsequent attempt at finding another job has been met with one rejection-letter after another, for months on end. You'll probably never find out how this lasting misfortune happened to you, but rest assured, some of the Republicans you cursed on your FaceBook page, including those radical Tea Party people and the Religious Right, turned out to be the very business owners and supervisors you worked for. And the reason you can't find another job in your field is because they then used the same Internet you used against them, only they used it to cyber-blacklist you on every private hiring-database throughout the world. Did you ever stop to think that every last piece of information you've ever carelessly barfed out in cyberspace has been meticulously collected and stored on these databases as a neat little record of who you really are, and of how far you'd foolishly hang your naked butt out in cyberspace for all the world to see and laugh at?
Or how about this dangerous tidbit. Let's say you've gone just a bit too far in repeatedly insulting a particular radical religion, and let's say that someone from another country really does want to kill you for your blasphemous words. Well, if you also happen to be one of those cute little social butterflies who loves to tweet about their next party or where they're gonna be hanging out next week at 9PM, it wouldn't be that difficult for your would-be assassin to masquerade as, say, another cute little social butterfly, then gain access to your Twitter stream, find out where you'll be next week, show up there unannounced, and then suddenly blow your head off with a 9mm semi-automatic that was concealed under the jacket.
And the list of cyber-dangers doesn't end there. Aside from the crime of identity-theft, people still have to contend with that even more subtle yet no less dangerous crime of identity-fraud, i.e. that person online really isn't the same person in the real world. That's where you have horror stories consisting of your teenage daughter cyber-chatting and texting with what she thinks is another teenage girl, but who really happens to be a forty-something-year-old sexual predator who has his sights set on violently raping your daughter and then selling her into sexual slavery on the other side of the planet. Yep, I thought that last bit about sexual slavery on the other side of the planet would get your attention. How do you know that your teenage daughter won't be kidnapped and sold into some underground sex-slave market outside of this country? Spiriting people out of this country is just as easy as spiriting them in. That might be the reason so many young kidnap victims are never seen alive or dead in this country ever again. No evidence, no body, no nothing. And all it took was the lure of the Internet, someone following your kids on FaceBook without you knowing it, monitoring you or your kids on Twitter to track your every move, your every habit, hunting you down like a skilled predator stalks his or her prey.
And yet, for all the extreme dangers that still exist in cyberspace, institutions and organizations are still insisting that people conduct their affairs online, in an environment that is barely a few decades old, and has thus scarcely been burn-tested. The Internet began as a US Government project in the 1970s. It then became open to public use some time in the late 1980s. Then the Worldwide Web exploded onto the scene in the mid 1990s. Ever since then, the use of the Internet has increased exponentially, devouring that much more of every American's life in every area imaginable. I remember the days when you had to search for information at the public library, using everything from card catalogs to microfiche. (That was so many years B.G., "Before Google.") Computers were still the stuff of science projects, and to program one, you had to know Fortran77, ... on punch-cards! The best a computer monitor could give you was green text streaming across the screen, with absolutely no graphics, and certainly no mouse to point-and-click your way around: you had to know what system commands to type into the keyboard (when keyboards finally replaced those pesky punch-cards), or you were screwed. As for storage, think rooms and rooms of reel-to-reel tape. Yep, no floppy diskettes yet, and when they were finally invented, those dinosaurs were far bigger than 5-1/4", but stored less! Nowadays, you can't even swing a dead cat without hitting a computer. My BlackBerry smartphone is practically a computer, one that has far more processing power than those room-sized reel-to-reel monsters ever had. I am typing this blog on a PC that can outstrip several THOUSAND room-sized Uni-vacs without even skipping a beat. And all of our most recent and impressive advances in information technology have barely taken place over the past thirty years. That's scarcely enough time for any human society to truly and meaningfully measure the overall impact such advances will really have on us all. Human beings need time, time to grow, time to learn, time to adapt, adjust, and improve on themselves. Computers enable people to get things done in mere hours, minutes, or even seconds. But human life requires days, weeks, months, years, even decades to learn and mature. It takes almost twenty years for a human being to go from birth to mature adulthood. That feat will never be accomplished in mere days or hours. Nevertheless, the Internet has given Americans this "fast-food illusion" that has absolutely no basis on reality. And understanding the impact of the Internet on human society will still take years, even decades to fully understand and document. Regardless of how thoroughly integrated into daily American life the Internet has become, Americans still need to learn the value of slowing down and unplugging themselves from cyberspace in order to truly live as human beings again. Countless centuries of human wisdom cannot be cancelled out by a mere few decades of cyberspace, and if you really want to find your true path in life, you will still have to do it in the real world, and not in cyberspace. After all, real-world wisdom still applies: hanging your naked butt out in the open will only make you the butt-end joke in any venue, even in cyberspace.
What if you belonged to a strictly orthodox religion (like Christianity, Judaism, or Islam), and for your political science project in college you wrote a detailed blog defending gay and lesbian rights. Now imagine going to your church/synagogue/mosque a few days later and finding that you and your family have been banned from ever having fellowship there again. Then a few days after that, you start getting threatening emails and phone calls from people you don't even know, some of whom live in other cities, other states, or even other countries. But they all have one thing in common: they were deeply and religiously offended by your blog, and they felt that the world would be a much better place without you in it. And who's to say they have to respect the sanctity of human life? If they happen to come from a radically religious nation that firmly believes in the death-penalty for all infidels, then you're basically marked for death. This is one example, a worldwide example, where you really need to think before you speak.
Or how about this one. (I've actually seen this happen in real life.) Let's say that you wrote something heinous and detrimental towards Republicans on your FaceBook page. You've even gone as far as saying, in so many words, that the only good Republican is a dead one. You even went on the warpath and cursed both the Tea Party and the Religious Right with the most graphically violent words possible. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, you go to work that Monday morning and find that you have been fired, without even so much as an explanation. Worse than that, every subsequent attempt at finding another job has been met with one rejection-letter after another, for months on end. You'll probably never find out how this lasting misfortune happened to you, but rest assured, some of the Republicans you cursed on your FaceBook page, including those radical Tea Party people and the Religious Right, turned out to be the very business owners and supervisors you worked for. And the reason you can't find another job in your field is because they then used the same Internet you used against them, only they used it to cyber-blacklist you on every private hiring-database throughout the world. Did you ever stop to think that every last piece of information you've ever carelessly barfed out in cyberspace has been meticulously collected and stored on these databases as a neat little record of who you really are, and of how far you'd foolishly hang your naked butt out in cyberspace for all the world to see and laugh at?
Or how about this dangerous tidbit. Let's say you've gone just a bit too far in repeatedly insulting a particular radical religion, and let's say that someone from another country really does want to kill you for your blasphemous words. Well, if you also happen to be one of those cute little social butterflies who loves to tweet about their next party or where they're gonna be hanging out next week at 9PM, it wouldn't be that difficult for your would-be assassin to masquerade as, say, another cute little social butterfly, then gain access to your Twitter stream, find out where you'll be next week, show up there unannounced, and then suddenly blow your head off with a 9mm semi-automatic that was concealed under the jacket.
And the list of cyber-dangers doesn't end there. Aside from the crime of identity-theft, people still have to contend with that even more subtle yet no less dangerous crime of identity-fraud, i.e. that person online really isn't the same person in the real world. That's where you have horror stories consisting of your teenage daughter cyber-chatting and texting with what she thinks is another teenage girl, but who really happens to be a forty-something-year-old sexual predator who has his sights set on violently raping your daughter and then selling her into sexual slavery on the other side of the planet. Yep, I thought that last bit about sexual slavery on the other side of the planet would get your attention. How do you know that your teenage daughter won't be kidnapped and sold into some underground sex-slave market outside of this country? Spiriting people out of this country is just as easy as spiriting them in. That might be the reason so many young kidnap victims are never seen alive or dead in this country ever again. No evidence, no body, no nothing. And all it took was the lure of the Internet, someone following your kids on FaceBook without you knowing it, monitoring you or your kids on Twitter to track your every move, your every habit, hunting you down like a skilled predator stalks his or her prey.
And yet, for all the extreme dangers that still exist in cyberspace, institutions and organizations are still insisting that people conduct their affairs online, in an environment that is barely a few decades old, and has thus scarcely been burn-tested. The Internet began as a US Government project in the 1970s. It then became open to public use some time in the late 1980s. Then the Worldwide Web exploded onto the scene in the mid 1990s. Ever since then, the use of the Internet has increased exponentially, devouring that much more of every American's life in every area imaginable. I remember the days when you had to search for information at the public library, using everything from card catalogs to microfiche. (That was so many years B.G., "Before Google.") Computers were still the stuff of science projects, and to program one, you had to know Fortran77, ... on punch-cards! The best a computer monitor could give you was green text streaming across the screen, with absolutely no graphics, and certainly no mouse to point-and-click your way around: you had to know what system commands to type into the keyboard (when keyboards finally replaced those pesky punch-cards), or you were screwed. As for storage, think rooms and rooms of reel-to-reel tape. Yep, no floppy diskettes yet, and when they were finally invented, those dinosaurs were far bigger than 5-1/4", but stored less! Nowadays, you can't even swing a dead cat without hitting a computer. My BlackBerry smartphone is practically a computer, one that has far more processing power than those room-sized reel-to-reel monsters ever had. I am typing this blog on a PC that can outstrip several THOUSAND room-sized Uni-vacs without even skipping a beat. And all of our most recent and impressive advances in information technology have barely taken place over the past thirty years. That's scarcely enough time for any human society to truly and meaningfully measure the overall impact such advances will really have on us all. Human beings need time, time to grow, time to learn, time to adapt, adjust, and improve on themselves. Computers enable people to get things done in mere hours, minutes, or even seconds. But human life requires days, weeks, months, years, even decades to learn and mature. It takes almost twenty years for a human being to go from birth to mature adulthood. That feat will never be accomplished in mere days or hours. Nevertheless, the Internet has given Americans this "fast-food illusion" that has absolutely no basis on reality. And understanding the impact of the Internet on human society will still take years, even decades to fully understand and document. Regardless of how thoroughly integrated into daily American life the Internet has become, Americans still need to learn the value of slowing down and unplugging themselves from cyberspace in order to truly live as human beings again. Countless centuries of human wisdom cannot be cancelled out by a mere few decades of cyberspace, and if you really want to find your true path in life, you will still have to do it in the real world, and not in cyberspace. After all, real-world wisdom still applies: hanging your naked butt out in the open will only make you the butt-end joke in any venue, even in cyberspace.
