Privacy is a protection from the unreasonable use of state and corporate power. But that is, in a sense, a secondary thing. In the first instance, privacy is the statement in words of a simple understanding, which belongs to the instinctive world rather than the formal one, that some things are the province of those who experience them and not naturally open to the scrutiny of others: courtship and love, with their emotional nakedness; the simple moments of family life; the appalling rawness of grief. That the state and other systems are precluded from snooping on these things is important - it is a strong barrier between the formal world and the hearth, extended or not - but at root privacy is a simple understanding: not everything belongs to everyone.
5 Ways To Build Your Brand on Social Media:1 Post content that add value2 Spread positivity3 Create steady stream of info4 Make an impact5 Be yourself
Freedom of Speech doesn't justify online bullying. Words have power, be careful how you use them.
We all have a responsibility with the words we post on the internet. If you wouldn't want your mother, daughter, sister or friend to read it, don't post it.
Personally, I believe "if it ain't broke, don't fix it". I'd rather use film cameras and vinyl records and cathode ray tubes than any sort of the digital technology available. Look around! The streets are full of people who would rather have their eyes on their cell phones than on the world around them! Scientists are researching technology to erase specific memories from people! Our thrown-away digital technology is showing up overseas in huge piles of toxic heavy metals and plastic! And yet there are still people who keep wanting technology and the future to keep going. They dream of flying cars, or humanoid robots, of populated cities on Mars. But do we really NEED this stuff? Maybe before we try to keep turning our world into an episode of The Jetsons, we should focus more on the problems that are surprisingly being overlooked now more than ever. Before we design another stupid cell phone or build a flying car, let's put a stop to racism, to sexism, to homophobia, to war. Let's stop buying all our "American" products from sweat shops overseas and let's end poverty in third-world countries. Let's let film photography never go obsolete, let's let print books continue to be printed. Let's stop domestic violence and child abuse and prostitution and this world's heavy reliance on prescription drugs. Let's stop terrorism, let's stop animal cruelty, , let's stop overpopulation and urbanization, let's stop the manufacture of nuclear weapons......I mean come on, we have all these problems to solve, but digital tech enthusiasts are more concerned that we don't have flying cars or robotic maids yet? That's pathetic.
Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-two million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.
Alecto, have you noticed how downhill this little island is becoming?” Mandy questioned sadly. “All these organic food stores and yoga studios and cellular phone towers… Cape Breton was one of the only places left where it still had that nostalgic small town atmosphere but now… I’ve only been away for a year, how could things have changed so quickly? I mean, how can the world accept it?”“C'est la vie,” said Alecto, looking extremely tired as he stared out the window at the late November maple keys fluttering down from vibrantly red trees lining the streets on either side of the windshield.
Growing up in the digital age, I'm expected to embrace all forms of modern technology with blissful ignorance. Books were always one of few escapes from this, because reading a book means not having to look at another damned glowing screen - which is why, no matter how "convenient" or "enhanced" digital enthusiasts claim that Ebooks are, I'll never see them as real books. They're just files of binary data, and while they might be considered books by a large amount of people, Ebooks have lost the human quality that real books have. You can argue that this is pretentious or stupid or nostalgic, but ultimately what will you pass down to your children and grandchildren? A broken old Kindle device with the same files that millions of other people have, or the dog-eared paperbacks that you fell in love with and wrote your name in and got signed by the author and flipped through in the bookstore and kept with you for years, like an old friend?
More pathetic than the digital age is the people who love it. They buy right into the "newer is always better" ideology and they can't seem to grasp that the fun of VHS tapes, super 8 film, darkroom photography and vinyl records is far more worthwhile and human than the cold, high-tech atmosphere of everything being digitized. As the 21st century progresses, yeah, we'll have our Netflix and our cellular phones and our artificial intelligence and our implanted microchips - and future generations will have lost something valuable. Sadly, they won't even know what they've lost because we're taking it all away from them.
Our society has led us to believe that everybody is on the internet these days. Contrary to popular belief everyone is not on social media.
Cell phones are certainly not necessary, and "but I'm from the digital age, this is what everyone in my generation is doing!" isn't a very good excuse for being hooked on a glowing screen 24/7. In the 1960's every teen of the times was tripping on acid and running off to find themselves in communes and love buses. It was a fad, there was no excuse for it and it passed, just like I think that this generation's "cell phones are necessary for socialization" fad will eventually pass. What will it bring afterwards? I don't even want to know, but I'll keep my fingers crossed and hope that it isn't anything else digital.
How promising today's generation is. They can whip out their cellular phones like sheep, instantly take a million digital photos of their cat and then just delete them. But I'd like to see these kids try to artfully use a traditional film camera or make a super 8 home movie. Traditional film takes integrity, nostalgia, effort, patience and imagination - things that the 21st century has very little of. Everything these days, even a superior medium like film photography with an extensively vivid history and an iconic meaning, is becoming disposable in this age.
…Maybe I’ll be watching super-8 home videos,” Alecto told her, smiling bleakly. “I love my super-8 camera, it’s an Eastman Kodak one… Kodak stopped manufacturing them, the world went digital and now Kodak has stopped making Kodachrome film and all kinds of traditional film products… it’s sad.” “Well, uh… well, have fun watching your home movies then,” Mandy finished, but she didn’t have the slightest idea what he was talking about.
We’re losing society to apathy, to digital technology, the people who care about nobody else but themselves. They share every little detail of their stupid lives online as if the world even gives a damn… digital technology is getting smarter and society is getting dumber,” Mandy whispered in a voice filled with disbelief. “Society is… it’s slipping away.
In the short run, technology many be more efficient than man, but it will never be perfect. Every piece of equipment will eventually reveal an error code. In the long run, man will never be perfect, but prove to be more reliable than technology.
People always say that digital cameras are much more stable than film cameras, but the truth is that digital cameras, or any kind of digital technology, is one of the most unstable things in the world. A film camera can last decades if you know how to look after it, but digital things can break down instantly. A violent storm, a nuclear bomb, even something as minor as a cracked screen or the releasing of newer models, can make a digital product just a block of useless metal.
Oftentimes she wondered what had happened to super 8. Sure, it made perfect sense that nobody wanted the hassle of spending money on a three-minute cartridge of film and threading it through a projector, but though digital cameras were convenient and cheap, Mandy didn’t care. Super 8 had integrity, it wasn’t just nostalgia, it was art, it was history, it was a little recording medium that somehow possessed the power to evoke lost memories, to turn back time, and there was something dazzling about waiting excitedly for a reel of film to come back in its yellow and red Kodak envelope, eating buttered popcorn while the projector paraded life’s best moments, and capturing something beautiful in only three minutes.
LED lighting has its place: cold, detached, hollow places like office buildings, factories, fast food chains and public schools - places full of humans but no human emotions. LED lighting really belongs in the apathy of the digital age, where science and technology rules over friendship, love and freedom. Incandescent light bulbs have a warm yellow-orange glow like the glow of a nice fireplace, where friends and family might sit and talk together or where children might open Christmas presents, a glow that can project celluloid films and bring back old memories, a glow that can light the text of a paperback novel. Something that beautiful, with that much power, could never last very long in a time as depressing and uncertain as the 21st century.
We make, see, and love films, not digitals. To convert all of our movies, home videos, theaters, photographs and television to digital would be like telling a painter to throw away his brushes and canvas for an I-Pad. Celluloid isn't just nostalgic, it's an art form and, like it or not, it's superior to digital. It lasts much longer, it provides grain and brighter colors, and it takes more effort so that it produces something wonderful. With the inferior binary codes, pixels and untested shelf-life of digital files, plus the fact that these days anyone with a digital camera, even a two-year-old, can make a video and pollute the world with self-photography and cat pictures, film has a lot more integrity and worth than digital.
Alford, Massachusetts: Mandy stood there with her old Nikon film camera, snapping photo after photo of the rural landscape. It was difficult to describe the wonderful feeling of there not being a single cell phone in sight; the only modern technology around was the faint blue glow of a cathode ray tube television in the window of a nearby house, and a few cars and trucks parked in crumbling gravel driveways. She was allowed to see this place, one that would likely be ruined by the 21st century as time went on… places like these were extremely hard to find these days. A world of wood-burning cookstoves and the waxy smell of Paraffin, laundry hung out to dry, rusty steel bridges over streams that reflected the bright blue skies, apple pies left out on windowsills… a world of hard work with very little to show for it aside from the sunlight beaming down on a proud community. And Mandy wanted to trap it all in her Kodak film rolls and rescue it from the future.
We were poor back then. Not living in a cardboard carton poor, not “we might have to eat the dog” poor, but still poor. Poor like, no insurance poor, and going to McDonald's was a really big excitement poor, wearing socks for gloves in the winter poor, and collecting nickels and dimes from the washing machine because she never got allowance, that kind of poor… poor enough to be nostalgic about poverty. So, when my mom and dad took me here for my tenth birthday, it was a really big deal. They’d saved up for two months to take me to the photography store and they bought me a Kodak Instamatic film camera… I really miss those days, because we were still a real family back then… this mall doesn’t even have a film photography store anymore, just a cell phone and digital camera store, it’s depressing…
I guess if there’s one thing I can say about the 21st century, it’s that the 21st century is all flash and no substance… everything is digital, nothing but files of invisible electronic data on computers and mindless zombies on their cellular phones… it’s sad how because of the digital age, society is ultimately doomed. Nothing in the digital age is real anymore, and you know, they say celluloid film and ray tube televisions and maybe even paper might become obsolete in this century? …What’s most annoying is that nobody cares, they’ve just learned to accept the digital age and get addicted to it… none of them are ever going to step up and say to the world, “you’re all a bunch of sheep!” and even if they did say anything, I doubt anyone would listen… they’re all too obsessed and attached to their cellular phones and overly big televisions and whatever other moronic things they’ve got these days… it almost makes me want an apocalypse to happen, to erase digital technology and force the world to start over again.
«Eliza opened her furry black satchel. She pulled out a portable CD player. “Gav, look here. Once, I loved this machine. Because it plays all my CDs. But nobody buys music in the stores any more! Even I don’t pay for music, and I’m rich! I’m carrying a zombie in my purse!”“Well, yes, that platform is obsolete now, but a new business model will arise for music.”“No it won’t! That’s a lie! Nobody will ever pay! The music business is the walking dead! Don’t lie to me.” Eliza stuffed her doomed device back in her furry purse.Gavin rubbed his chin. “Your Digital Native generation really has some issues.”»
You’re innocent until proven guilty,” Mandy exclaimed, unable to hide her gleeful smile. She missed the way people used to have normal conversations, used to be more caring for each other than themselves, back in the Seventies and Eighties. These days, she realized, neighbors kept to themselves, their kids kept to themselves, nobody talked to each other anymore. They went to work, went shopping and shut themselves up at home in front of glowing computer screens and cellphones… but maybe the nostalgic, better times in her life would stay buried, maybe the world would never be what it was. In the 21st century music was bad, movies were bad, society was failing and there were very few intelligent people left who missed the way things used to be… maybe though, Mandy could change things. Thinking back to the old home movies in her basement, she recalled what Alecto had told her. “We wanted more than anything else in the world to be normal, but we failed.” The 1960’s and 1970’s were very strange times, but Mandy missed it all, she missed the days when Super-8 was the popular film type, when music had lyrics that made you think, when movies had powerful meanings instead of bad comedy and when people would just walk to a friend’s house for the afternoon instead of texting in bed all day. She missed soda fountains and department stores and non-biodegradable plastic grocery bags, she wished cellphones, bad pop music and LED lights didn’t exist… she hated how everything had a diagnosis or pill now, how people who didn’t fit in with modern, lazy society were just prescribed medications without a second thought… she hated how old, reliable cars were replaced with cheap hybrid vehicles… she hated how everything could be done online, so that people could just ignore each other… the world was becoming much more convenient, but at the same time, less human, and her teenage life was considered nostalgic history now.Hanging her head low, avoiding the slightly confused stare of the cab driver through the rear view mirror, she started crying uncontrollably, her tears soaking the collar of her coat as the sun blared through the windows in a warm light.
…I’m afraid of what the digital age will do to the world, to the things we think are important… it’s almost like people want to believe in some illusion that they’re robots and forget altogether that they’re real, living people… but everything these days is disposable, even people themselves, and that’s why I’m afraid for the world,” Mandy confessed, looking depressed and worried.“So am I… but I’ll still watch all of it as the world dooms itself, because I want to see how it ends, and whether or not they’ll be intelligent enough to forget all of this digital illusion afterwards,” Alecto explained. “I’m sure that they’ll be able to realize how wrong it all is… even though the idiots outnumber most people these days, there are still enough intelligent people to fight against it.
Every day it’s something worse being predicted. Mearth says that sooner or later copyright on books will be all in the past because they’ll all be available electronically. She says that electric cars will replace gasoline-powered cars. She says that something called drones will be used to watch the entire country, she talks a lot about something called nanotechnology, and 3-dimensional printing and cellular phones being implanted into peoples’ minds and all available careers being replaced by robots and human cloning and overpopulation and film becoming obsolete, cellular phones making regular telephones obsolete and LED lighting replacing everything and eventually she says that the planet will collapse and become an apathetic wreck,” Alecto replied rapidly, his run-on sentence sounding sinister and dangerous. “Mearth says that eventually people will be able to see inside the minds of everyone.
Think before you click. If people do not know you personally and if they cannot see you as you type, what you post online can be taken out of context if you are not careful in the way your message is delivered.
Piracy is robbery with violence, often segueing into murder, rape and kidnapping. It is one of the most frightening crimes in the world. Using the same term to describe a twelve-year-old swapping music with friends, even thousands of songs, is evidence of a loss of perspective so astounding that it invites and deserves the derision it receives.
Yeah, you’re right about having entire rooms full of film and photos… in that Sydney Mines house I have a darkroom, I have boxes of film and home movie footage… I have a few projectors, I have piles of Kodachrome slides… I like photographs. The world is always running away from society and the only way to keep the stuff that’s happened in the past is by taking photographs, I can keep memories of things alive with photographs,” Alecto responded. “People say that a time machine can’t be invented, but they’ve already invented a device that can stop time, cameras are the world’s first time machines… The steel mill, the coal mines, the train tracks, the smog in the sky, I’ve been able to rescue it on super-8 and Kodachrome, and no one can remediate those photographs, I can keep them as long as I want to.
What goes up, must come down." Well, Issac Newton's law doesn't apply to the internet. That's what people don't realize. When you put something up, as long as there is an internet there will be that same stuff. When you're a senior citizen, what you uploaded to Facebook at a high school party will still be there. Whatever you upload to the internet, no matter how strong your passwords and security are, guaranteed the government or some advertising corporation will look at what you post someday. The only law that applies to the internet is, "For every reaction, there is an equal and opposite reaction." Post a photograph and you'll get attention. Post your old scanned Kodak slides and family home movies, you'll get a nostalgia rush and you'll reunite people with better days. But post a bad thing, thinking you can go unnoticed, and you'll never be able to crawl out from underneath it.
Except now everything is digital even murder. There is a record for everything under the sun from the moon and back whether we like it or not. The image that I have of the future is that it is very bleak. It is darkness visible. The black dog of depression will hang us all in the end. Considering the life we live, the values we teach our children, what we believe in everything is a movement for change and every pause between words is a revolutionary act. The ‘struggle’ was like a painful mental illness. The liberation in retrospect was either the exit from our slavery ushering us into a novel, brave, bold and brilliant world or a mass hallucination. The political climate in post-apartheid South Africa has gone as far as corrupting liberty.
That Yank glean is long gone anyway; money, sex, power, it’s gone global – no one has a monopoly on it anymore. The towering skyscrapers of New York had fallen long before the second plane; we all knew it. The twang of the Yank accent doesn’t give girls that twinge these days, even the dollar sign is looking dated, its day long past. No, America doesn’t have it anymore.But then nowhere does. We don’t chop the world up by borders anymore, don’t slice peoples and dice continents. It’s all a sweltering mess, a fucking free-for-all. We went global centuries ago, today we’ve gone digital, and digital doesn’t have borders.
But Bennie knew that what he was bringing into the world was shit. Too clear, too clean. The problem was precision, perfection; the problem was digitization, which sucked the life out of everything that got smeared through its microscopic mesh. Film, photography, music: dead. An aesthetic holocaust! Bennie knew better than to say this stuff aloud.
Time and space travel is easily achievable using tape. The physicality of the recordings allow us to jaunt to any location and time. There isn’t enough scope for arbitrary and random interjections with digital recordings. There must be an unconscious input from the recorder to traverse the cosmos.