Saturday, February 18, 2012

Honk if You Feel Crowded

So the Department of Defense, the Director of National Intelligence and the FBI (among others, I'm sure) are looking for software that can sniff out criminal activity among the oceans of social media postings. To the extent they already do that sort of thing they may have noted the article you are reading right now, though it would be due purely to keyword matches, not the volume of readership.

So we'll have a few more netizens eating up the meager bandwidth left over after the junk e-mailers and web crawlers have had their fill. I'm not much of a social mediaphyte, so I have little objection to their pawing through what my friends of friends have seen already. I usually roll my eyes when people cry "privacy!" the moment Facebook, Twitter or Google burp out a new policy; such folk are at the very least naive if not disingenuous. If they wanted a private conversation, there are many methods available that pre-date the web.  No, I'm more concerned (though just barely) about their clogging of the information superhighway with more traffic.

Frankly, I'm still amazed that I can download in a second or two what it used to take over a minute just to save on a floppy.

(If you don't know what a "floppy" is, then you are too young to be reading this blog.)

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