Sunday Story # 1: Are we allowing the Internet to eat up our own intelligence?
By: Suraya Dewan — Feb. 6, 2016
Technology started with the creation of a simple fire in the cavemen era. Now, it has improved to the point where we cannot function a second without it. As technologies progress, we will be introduced to new iPhones with now features, TVs the size of the screens in movie theaters that fits into your wall and cars that don’t run on gas. Can life get any easier? The author of Terms of Service, Jacob Silverman, explains how the Internet will impact us in the future. In his book, he tells us
Jacob Silverman
Silverman writes,
“Under the paternalistic hands of Google and Facebook, we have been building digital lives only to give them away wholesale, all because the services were convenient and free and we told ourselves that we didn’t know better.”
Here, Silverman brings up one of the most obvious things happening in our society, that we don’t notice at all at first. Facebook and Google has been part of the trend in our society for a while now. Starting with googling a few letters where the whole word you we going to write comes up, to Google maps, to Google glasses, Google continues to maintain its friendship with its users. Facebook, on the other hand, impresses all of its users as it continues to give new features in the messenger section, colored filters for #PrayforParis, short videos of you and your friends for Friendship day, etc.
In this video, Silverman says how newspapers was a technology and it was useful in the sense that you can use to to get news, swat a fly, take it to the bathroom, give it to a friend, save it in a box to show your kids something from the past, etc., but with technologies such as phones and recent devices, you can’t do that. This is true, because an iPhone 4 may be useful, but it wouldn’t be as useful as the latest iPhone 6s, or that’s what it seems.
Jacob Silverman has no social media accounts, expect for his own website about his writing and observations about the Internet world and the our society. He doesn’t have an official Twitter account but this is possibly his Twitter account, or some fan imitating him.
Silverman starts his introduction with a conversation between Mark Zuckerberg, the creator of Facebook.
I thought this was an interesting and entertaining way of opening the book, because it is true even though we don’t think about it or see it. When we make an account we are willing to share our personal information and we are ready to accept the terms of agreement, in other words, the terms of service.
