The Mind of Mierow

Officially my age is just outside of what is considered ‘net gen‘ (those born between ‘77-’96), but I don’t think that ‘generation x‘ (‘65-’82) full describes all of my attitudes either. At times I see my views on life starting to look like those of a ‘baby boomer‘. Where does all of this come into play when talking about living online? Hopefully I’ve got a good answer for that.

I find it weird that people feel that the information that they put online is somehow their own private data. I’m not talking about intellectual property, or the freedom to express one’s self, but rather the attitude or feeling that the internet is one big personal playground. It is theirs to use as they feel, and no one should be able to tell them otherwise. I feel that everyone should be able to express themselves however they see fit. There are even ways that they can do this with technology so that it is preserved for the next generation. If you have something to hide, online is not the place for you. Let me try to go back and explain some of this.

I love technology. You can call me a geek and I will take it as a compliment. I love playing with new tech, old tech, broken tech, unknown tech, whatever. My wife (God bless her) knows and understands this is part of who I am. I try not to get too crazy about it, because I recognize it could quickly take over my entire life. I don’t have any servers at home. I’m not running multiple OS’s. I don’t even own a Mac (gasp!). Well… I would own a Mac if I had money, but that’s a totally different post.

I have been playing/working with technology since 4th grade. I clearly remember my grade school getting our Apple II computers. It started with a lot of playing at first, but by 6th or 7th grade I had purchsed a book from those Scholastic book forms that had 100+ programs. The key was you had to program them your self. So I would spend a couple of hours of copying out of this book something that looked like this:

10 PRINT “Mierow is awesome”

20 GOTO 10

Now multiply that by 200 and I would end up with a small little skiing game or something similar. This got me hooked on technology and I didn’t look back. I played with hooking up my roommate’s radio to my computer in college so that we could get digital recordings of his tapes (Windows 3.11 ftw!). We would “browse” the ‘information superhighway‘ on the amber screens and find friends in a bbs. I upgraded my RAM from 8MB to 16MB and found a huge increase in performance. My wife now comes to expect that when I’m looking at my phone 95% of the time I’m twittering ot checking in on my tweeps.

With all of my expereinces I’ve seen the good and bad that has come with technology. I saw new friendships made, and I saw bullies and jerks continue their harassment. Rumors and gossip spread as quickly through the internet as fast as word of mouth in high school. I consider myself lucky to have seen the technology change as I have. I think that because of this I have a great outlook and attitude towards technology. Then again, I’m probably biased

What does all of this have to do with living life online? For me it goes back to the notion that people feel the internet is their own, and don’t see the bigger implications. I don’t think that this attiitude is limited to just the teens of today. We hear stories from people of all ages, races, locations who have posted something online. They are reprimanded for it by someone else, and then they complain about censorship and privacy. I will cover someone’s back when it comes to privacy. No one should have to worry about anyone getting a sneak peak at their personal info. Everyone has rights and freedoms that need to be protected from both the government as well as other people. On the otherhand, if you decide that you want to post something online, I think you need to stop and think first.

Maybe there need to be some PSA’s with Shia LaBeouf talking about the saftey of using Facebook or MySpace. Or maybe that girl from The Hills could warn others about posting bad pics to Flickr or cyberbullying (appologies to ‘that girl’ but I don’t watch, and don’t care to). Either way, I think that we need to start helping educate everyone on what today’s technology means. For me it means that more and more of us becoming connected to one another each day. This is happening whether we know it or not. There are people who view my blog, read my tweets, etc… and I will never know who they are. If they make a connection with me – great! If they move on and never come back that works for me.

This isn’t any type of personal rant against any one particular outrage. As I hear more and more stories of incidents happening online, I’m just trying to figure out how I can help. I think awareness and education are the first steps in helping. What can you do?