Putting a Life Online
I feel incredibly compelled to point to this Wired Magazine article about Hasan Elahi, who has been posting many fine details about his life to the Internet for a few years because the US government has him on a list of terrorists. I feel odd doing so because the article is somewhat tangential to the main focus of this weblog. I want you to look at it not because of this man’s situation with the government, but because he’s one of these people who does what many people cannot understand: he shares all sorts of details about his life via the Internet. He’s doing it as a way to attempt to prove to the government he isn’t a terrorist, but he points out something of which we need to be very aware:
"Elahi says his students get [why he puts his life online] immediately. They’ve grown up spilling their guts online — posting Flickr photo sets and confessing secrets on MySpace. He figures the day is coming when so many people shove so much personal data online that it will put Big Brother out of business."
People are using the Internet for much more than for what many of us have used it and in ways some of us might consider to be risky. If we aren’t reaching out to these Internet superusers in ways that make sense to them and approach them on their own turf, we put ourselves and some of the services we offer and businesses we run at risk.
