hmmmm

Now that we have a president in office who is more technologically literate there are interesting things happening, like a blog, YouTube vids, etc. One that has recently captured my attention is this Open For Questions business. My first reaction is that this is a really cool idea! You can ask the President questions and also vote on which questions you want to hear answers about and he'll actually answer them. Wow. Impressive, right?

Except for one thing. You have to create an account (as if I wasn't already signed up for a hundred other things that I didn't really want). Call me paranoid, but I feel like this is one more way that the government is able to keep tabs on us. A username, password, email address, zip code and IP address. Hmmm. Standard for pretty much every site.

I understand that signing up for an account with Open For Questions helps moderate the site and keeps spammers away. That's a very legit reason. And why is it that I feel a little uncertain about signing up with just my zip code and email when a couple handfuls of websites have my home address and PayPal, Amazon, eBay, Kiva and a number of other sites all have my credit card numbers? Do I even need to go into the whole debacle of the ridiculous copyright rules of posting photos on facebook or the fact that almost every college student in America probably lists their cell phone number too?

We, Americans, protect our privacy almost religiously, yet we give our information quite freely to the internet. Compare us to other countries, say the UK, where billions of pounds are spent every year on CCTV, and it doesn't seem quite as odd. The average person in the UK may be caught on camera 300 times a day.

And then we blog. Letting some of the most private thoughts out in the open, hoping that one person will comment and say "I agree with you!" as if that really justifies our existence in the world.

Strange we become when given this medium of global communication.