The death of anonymity, the birth of the media zombie.

I'm not going to lie, the internet completely fascinates me, as do human relationships, and luckily for me those two things seem well and truly intertwined.

Andy Warhol was claimed "In the future everyone will have their 15 minutes of fame", in all honesty judging by youtube most people are pretty chuffed with 30 seconds of pixelated fame, but in our desperate bid for our 30 seconds of fame, what are we sacrificing and do people really understand it?

I have to be honest, and say that I truly think I've lived in one of the most exciting eras in regards to technology, in my lifetime there's been the birth of html, the introduction of media on the internet, the touchscreen phone and now I'm at a point where I have 3 seperate media devices in my living room alone, all of which have internet connections. Schools are encouraging teachers to put learning documents online (although I can name a few reasons why I think uptake is slow) and we can check into a flight without even being at the airport.

All of those things are brilliant, they improve the way I interact with media, they make it easily available at any point, and if I want to I can reliably show my freind a cat sticking its head under a tap for a shower (or two girls one cup) whilst in the pub. We put contact information up, we put our interests up, all for friends to see, but what I've noticed is that so many people dont realise that information on the internet is in the public domain, whilst great for our freinds, its also great for advertisers, it means they can specifically target their ads to us, companies can profit by selling our details, our websearches can be analysed, we can be profiled by companies and by our rulers.

So how do the teenagers of today face this, well clearly they accept it, facebook is the new mobile phone, it tells you everything you need to know about most people you'd want to know about, in the nineties people walked around with a big black piece of plastic to their ears, in the noughties every looks at the device in their hands, eye contact is almost no existent in public places, but that doesnt matter because our favourite song is being streamed right from the internet and into our ears, as it is with the person standing next to us, and the one standing next to them........ Get the picture of what I'm saying.

At first we had the ability to control the information age, now we've given up those rights to enter into contracts with companies in different countries with never read, who take every detail of our online lives and puts it up for retail, whilst regurgitated attempts at retro music and films get force onto our screens and into our heads. People dont need to learn things anymore, because there's a million people who know it, or have experienced it at their fingertips on call 24 hours a day to answer the questions that your mum and dad wont.

So lets give it up for ourselves now, the generation that gave away our freedoms for convenience. HUZZAH! [/toff]