Week 10: Privacy, Disclosure, & Lying

            I know I’m not the only one to remember those early day of online socializing; moving from A/S/L to message boards, communication was suddenly new and exciting again. Flash forward a few years and suddenly our own government is spying us on, facing cyber attacks from overseas radicals, and combating fraud and identity theft on a daily basis. Man, where did that young innocent Internet of my youth go?

            Today we find an online world littered with everything and anything. Remember that picture of you from high school with the six-pack box on your head? Yep, still online; it’s become common knowledge that what goes online stays online, that however wasn’t always the case. In Nussabaum’s piece, she attempts to find the exact moment when adolescents and young adults began opening up to the public eye. She brings up MTV’s Real World as an example of privacy being removed willingly, all in the name of entertainment. I’m of the belief that, while influential in lowering, Real World was less effective in wanting young people to share but instead made them want to become consumed in the media of others. 

            Technology has made sharing life’s moments simple and easy. It has caused there to be a massive influx in content being created and disseminated across the web. What type of world would we have if not for social media or user-generated content? With all of this information exchanging hands online it was only a matter of time before online privacy took center stage in our lives. With the recent revelations regarding the NSA and its worldwide online spying circuit, you would hope people would realize this was a bigger issue than previously feared.