A brief note on sci-fi
I think I understand cyberpunk a little better now. It started with this video of a FOX news report on "hacker gangs." Initially, I was intrigued because I didn't expect FOX to treat this story properly, and I wasn't disappointed. Watch the video, and once it gets to the point where the reporter equates "posting on someone's MySpace profile" with terrorism (and they play footage of a random van exploding), you can tell that this isn't an issue that we need to be fearful of.
What was interesting, however, was finding out about these Anonymous people. Apparently, they hang out in places like 4chan and ebaumsworld and the crappy Wiki-knockoff I used to cite both of them. Stumbling my way through these sites, I was struck by this whole new lexicon of terms, stuff which I never knew existed.
Did you know that to get "killed" online (i.e. to have your real life identity discovered) is called getting "doxed," which refers to having your documents ("docs," meaning whatever information you want to hide, such as name, address, family members, financial information, etc.) seized and published online? Just look at this guy, whose parents will probably never let him on the internet again until he moves out.
Another strange bit of phraseology surrounds the peculiar internet demographic (I refuse to say netizen) of the 16-year-old girl. It seems that when describing this group, your best course of action is to choose a noun like "camera" or "attention" or "drama" or "livejournal" and then simply add "whore" after it. I tell you, you'll fit right in. Thankfully, there's a dedicated undercurrent of feminist outcry in the form of the "lolscenequeens," 16-year-old girls who devote their online lives to scorning the attention-grabbing activities of the other 16-year-old girls.
Anyway, my point behind all this is I can't remember how many cyberpunk novels I read where everyone lived online and developed these radically different forms of communication and expression. And I recall thinking how silly it all seemed. But now it really is happening: there is a large portion of individuals, both younger than us and roughly our age, who are formulating their thoughts and their identity in a profoundly different manner than the rest of us. It's a little unnerving to peruse these sites and, having been completely unaware that they'd existed until today, realize how deep and prevalent these mindsets are. I'd always assumed that even if we ever reached such a time when that kind of tendency was both popular and widespread, we'd be in the not-so-near future. Maybe all my old-man worries about "the next generation" and "kids these days" weren't so far off.
What was interesting, however, was finding out about these Anonymous people. Apparently, they hang out in places like 4chan and ebaumsworld and the crappy Wiki-knockoff I used to cite both of them. Stumbling my way through these sites, I was struck by this whole new lexicon of terms, stuff which I never knew existed.
Did you know that to get "killed" online (i.e. to have your real life identity discovered) is called getting "doxed," which refers to having your documents ("docs," meaning whatever information you want to hide, such as name, address, family members, financial information, etc.) seized and published online? Just look at this guy, whose parents will probably never let him on the internet again until he moves out.
Another strange bit of phraseology surrounds the peculiar internet demographic (I refuse to say netizen) of the 16-year-old girl. It seems that when describing this group, your best course of action is to choose a noun like "camera" or "attention" or "drama" or "livejournal" and then simply add "whore" after it. I tell you, you'll fit right in. Thankfully, there's a dedicated undercurrent of feminist outcry in the form of the "lolscenequeens," 16-year-old girls who devote their online lives to scorning the attention-grabbing activities of the other 16-year-old girls.
Anyway, my point behind all this is I can't remember how many cyberpunk novels I read where everyone lived online and developed these radically different forms of communication and expression. And I recall thinking how silly it all seemed. But now it really is happening: there is a large portion of individuals, both younger than us and roughly our age, who are formulating their thoughts and their identity in a profoundly different manner than the rest of us. It's a little unnerving to peruse these sites and, having been completely unaware that they'd existed until today, realize how deep and prevalent these mindsets are. I'd always assumed that even if we ever reached such a time when that kind of tendency was both popular and widespread, we'd be in the not-so-near future. Maybe all my old-man worries about "the next generation" and "kids these days" weren't so far off.