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follow elimisteve at http://twitter.com
I just joined Twitter. This may end soon. I wish I had time to keep "track" of and "follow" (damn I'm clever) the new internet revolutions. First came IMs, then Slashdot, then blogs, then Digg/Reddit, and that's as far as I had really explored. Now there's Justin.tv, Twitter, lifecasting in general (which has EXTREMELY fascinating implications for personal privacy, democracy, freedom, and government data collection, as this is a facet of sousveillance), and everything "going mobile."
If a cop does something shady, BAM -- someone snaps photos and uploads them to Flickr, or captures the entire event on a camera phone and uploads it to LiveLeak or YouTube. Millions of people can learn about the actions of public workers and officials and, if we strongly disapprove, can cause a tremendous uproar in response. I like this a lot.
On the other end of the spectrum, we have our government's illegal wiretapping of our phones as well as our internet access. We have my entire generation posting their personal information on social networking sites like Myspace (which is so two years ago) and Facebook. Now, I've certainly used it, and it's really neat... until people (or companies, or governments) begin doing things you don't like with private-turned-public info, like putting innocent people on no-fly lists or spying on political opponents and activists, which is potentially very serious; this is how dictatorships begin.
I'm impressed at and excited by what the internet is and what it may become. Hopefully personal transparency gets translated into government transparency. We'll see.