Friday, February 16, 2007

Bill Maher Says...

The Blog | Bill Maher: New Rule | The Huffington Post

Bill Maher on America's obsession with political blunders.

He speaks of what he knows, Bill does. It was Maher who lost his job on ABC by saying that the 9/11 hijackers were hardly "cowards". He had a point, of course, but the implication was too much for the public to handle, apparently. They jumped on him, egged on by the media, and got turfed. It wasn't the first time he said something controversial, of course, after all the show was called "Politically Incorrect". His bread and butter was controversy.

But every controversy has its tipping point, and Bill found this out quickly.

Wednesday, February 14, 2007

Nothing To Hide

And now, nothing can be hid.

Just wanted to mark this day as the day vast amounts of my personal data became consolidated by Google. Now that I've upgraded to the new version of Blogger, I am forced to log in with my Google account.

Now my search history, browsing history and blog posts are all stored by one company.

Today I was forced to abandon the last strands of anonymity to which I was grasping. It was always an illusion of sorts, but it wrought tangible effects on my online behaviour, and I assume this is true for many. The massive expansion of the internet is due partly to the anonymous, i.e. faceless, nature of online communication. Would we be so bold to state our mind if we were standing at a podium, rather than sitting behind a screen?

Surely not all of this is lost, however. We still sit behind screens to write our words, and whether we are "truly" anonymous is not really a question, since we never really were. But those of us who write on the web reveal much more than others, who simply search. And does the loss of anonymity for bloggers change anything? Certainly every thoughtful blogger at some time must say they have nothing to hide, and accept that someone might actually learn who they are. And upon reflection, this is what blogging is all about, isn't it?