Time is precious, so I’ll skip the intro and get straight into the point: the Internet is the new television and people love to feed on other peoples’ disasters. Mix these two ingredients together and you have the vicarious social media users feeding on the world’s disasters in real time while being able to participate in the retransmission of the sad news. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, we have a winner, television is no match to the new media.
There you have it, that’s the whole article summarized in one small paragraph. You can close this window now and go re-tweet this post. Or, maybe you do have a little bit of time to spend on actually reading an article besides its headline. If that is the case, read on.
We grew up watching TV
The Internet is a big thing now, but most of us grew up without it. Television, on the other hand has been the dominating media throughout our lives and we all had the joy of watching the news live on our TV set. Of course the term “news” is really a vague thing here since today the news on TV is nothing more than opinionated people who are getting paid to criticize politicians (and everybody else) while arguing with each other from within their small “windows” in the TV screen.
Now, since few people really care about politics and the good news either bore people or make them envy each other, TV people managed to keep the people alert (and thus increasing their profit) by portraying all sorts of misery, sickness, disaster and perversion that exists in every corner of our little universe we call Earth. Apparently, people fancy watching how other people were killed, murdered, injured or generally got involved in a nasty situation while they themselves are enjoying the comfort of their sofa and are eating pop corn.
“A hurricane killed a dozen of people“, “A mother murdered her son“, “Earthquake in X place – bodycount still going on“, “Serial killer maniac kills 20” and the list goes on and on and on. Millions upon millions of people sit on their couches every night to watch how the rest of the billions out there are having a hard time staying alive.
Finally, we are not passive TV zombies anymore
Ah, the new era; the Internet, world wide web, social media. The neat thing about social media is that no longer are you a passive receiver of information getting thrown to you via TV, but an active transceiver (transmitter / receiver hybrid) able to form your own network of people around the globe to connect to and participate in the endless flow of information (pointers) brokerage (popularity being its currency) that is taking place on Twitter, Friendfeed etc. Everybody is re-posting everybody else’s links to a gazillion of supposedly interesting blog posts or other media without (hardly) ever reading them. Social media forms the public opinion by counting which articles are getting the most re-tweeting (re-transmission from one user to another).
But the power of social media comes to play when something big is happening at some place of our world, like, for example, the terrorist attacks at Mumbai or the recent Iranian elections incident. Or just when a plane crashes, or an earthquake or wildfire happens. It is only then that social media portrays its value as an awesome tool that allows common people like you and me to post information (text, photo or even video) from the ground zero of every such incident so the world knows first-hand what’s going on in real-time.
Pay attention to they real keywords here: disaster, common people, real time. People are using social media as a tool that connects them to one another so they can transmit information about a disaster in real time. This is nothing less than a live transmission of disastrous news withing the network of users that you are a part of, meaning that you are no longer a passive receiver of the tragic news, but a lively active node in the social graph that gets to re-transmit the bad news to other people.
Yes, lucky social media participant; now you can be the man in the TV breaking news section with the information that the actual number of casualties is 53 and not 51 (according to some other user of course, who got it from another user who read it someplace). You can spend your whole day re-transmitting the information you’re getting from your network to, well, the rest of your network, not only vicariously feedingon the tragedy itself but taking pride in being the newsman in the same time.
It’s awesome.
(Now don’t get me wrong, I do love social media, but not always favor the way people are using them)
It looks like creating an online identity in the post-web 2.0 era that we’re living in is essential. People go into great lengths to present themselves in the online world, participate in as many social networks they can, flood microblogging services like Twitter and Friendfeed with their thoughts, opinions and emotions, share their photos on photo-sharing sites, upload short video clips of themselves on sites like Seesmic, and the list goes on and on and on.
After great effort, we manage to create a solid social online identity to expose our selves and our lives to the public, updating it with fragments of our personalities and everyday activities. But what happens to our online identity when we die? We are all going to die one day — that’s for sure. Have you ever wondered what is going to happen to your online identity in that case?
All of a sudden, you will stop updating. People may nudge you, poke you, send you direct messages, but they wouldn’t get any replies. E-mails that are reaching your inbox will never receive a reply. Cold silence will come out of your Twitter account and your Facebook friends will wonder what’s keeping you busy. Your blog’s RSS feed won’t show any new activity and all the myriads of social networks you joined during your life will host an account that never updates.
How will your online friends know what happened to you if none of your friends or family members are using those services as well? Will people ever wonder what may have happened to me if all of a sudden I stop posting updates on Twitter? Are they going to search for me in other social networks, or leave a comment on my blog, or e-mail me asking why I’ve stopped participating? No person in my physical environment is using Twitter, so no-one’s going to post news about my death.
Will people care after all? Is there any “friend” or “follower” that is going to care that I’ve ceased to post and to exist? And if they got to find out, how would they react? Would they mourn, sob, laugh, re-tweet the news of my death or just un-follow me since no more updates would ever be coming from my account?
Finally, what is going to happen with the information that I’ve submitted to all these sites and services? Will my Facebook account or my Flickr photos still be there, years after I die? Would my family be able to browse my photos, my social networking timeline, my videos and my e-mails and all the myriads of tiny fragments I’ve submitted to the Internet (e.g. comments on other people’s posts)? Would it make them feel better if the data was still there, or would they merely be unable to delete my accounts (since they don’t know the passwords)?
I can’t help but ponder all these questions. I don’t know what’s best to be done. Entrepreneurs could build on this idea, and create a “social memorial” or “web graveyard” for the lost souls of online identities of departed persons. They could even create a service that monitors all online activity of every person and declare them as “missing” if they don’t update in any online service for some time (i.e. a year), or declare them as “dead” after more time passes. They could even crawl the web for every piece of information regarding that person, gather it and create an entry in their Social Memorial so people will remember them.
They could even give the option for their family and friends to pay in order to promote their loved one’s profile to the top of the list, so they could gain more new “mourners”. There may be a grader for these deceased online identities, measuring the value of each one and creating lists about who was the most social one. Such a service may exists even now, as I’m writing this. If there is, please leave a comment and let me know, and if there’s not, I’m damn sure there’s going to be one in the future. This is the social era, everything can be used (and abused) in the name of profit!
For the ambitious entrepreneurs that may be reading this, here’s one more idea: give people the ability to sign up for such a service while they’re living, so they can link it to all their social networks and other sources of personal information. The service would monitor all these sources and upon a prolonged lack of activity, it would create a memorial for them. There you go, I give you this idea for free — it’s too morbid for me to monetize on.
Update [20 May 2009]: Looks like somebody decided to monetize on the premise. I was damn sure this would happen.
I haven’t been a hardcore gamer in my life, except for manically trying to finish the Monkey Island series when I was younger and perhaps the short burst I had with Grand Theft Auto, but I don’t usually play games. I did, however, indulge into trying out World of Warcraft (WoW) which led to some serious time-wasting that could almost be classified as an addiction.
Having played WoW for almost a year before quitting and indulging into social media lately, I can’t help but witness the similarities between the two (of course this applies to almost all MMORPGs, but I’m referring to WoW since it’s the only one I’ve ever used).
A whole new world
World of Warcraft is actually the MMORPG version of the game Warcraft, and Blizzard (the company that created it) did a very nice job in creating a massive and diverse universe for its players. The world is quite big, spanning continents with dozens of areas, each being special in its own way. It’s not so trivial to explore all the different lands in the game since the world is just too big.
Social media, on the other hand, don’t have the equivalent of space – there is no such thing as a “world”. However, explorations are not at all absent, since there are many different “areas” that users can explore. For example, Facebook sports applications as well as groups, and even browsing all of them could possibly take years. There’s something new to explore, and there are even applications (games) on Facebook that are plain versions of MMORPG’s (e.g. Mob Wars).
A parallel universe
Even though scientists have yet to decide upon a commonly accepted universal theory about the nature of our universe, it’s pretty safe to say that we (at least physically) appear to be living in the same universe with each other. However, our players in WoW are living in their own universe. It doesn’t really matter if that universe exists only inside Blizzard’s servers, it’s still a valid universe with its own space-time and its own laws. It is a parallel universe to ours, albeit in a Matrix-like fashion (maintained by computers).
Who’s to claim that the Internet isn’t a parallel universe as well? We all know we can go “online”, but where is that online space? Your online identity exists not in the real world (there you have your “actual” identity) but in the Internet world. You can log in anytime to this world and interact with it. You “peek” into this universe every time you launch your favorite Twitter browser, so you can interact with other “online” versions of actual people (or even robots – bots). You enter it every time you’re on Facebook, and in a more direct way when you log into the 3D virtual world of Second Life.
Be it newsgroups, Twitter, Facebook, Second Life, WoW or even the web, the Internet is a parallel universe created and maintained by humans with the aid of machines. Each one of us has their own (possibly multiple) identity in each of such worlds.
Levelling
One of the most important aspects of WoW is that of levelling. You start at level 1 as a young and poor guy (or gal) with practically no knowledge of surviving in the world. You soon begin to learn how to combat, so to protect your life from predators as well as how to make money out of the items you get by looting their corpses, so you can buy new clothes, weapons etc. Every time you gain enough experience, you “level” (used as a verb) and become more powerful; your health, strength and other stats are increased and you can buy arms and clothes of higher quality.
Levelling makes the world really addictive mainly for two reasons: first, players always want to gain “one more level”, so they never stop playing; second, because they’re in a constant direct/indirect competition with all the other players, so they need to level up and become better than them. This is so true in WoW, that having a character of the highest possible level brings much joy to players and makes them feel rather superior to their lower level peers.
People are always in direct or indirect competition to each other in our society and it’s always enjoyable to feel “better” than others or “superior” to them. Social media was built on this premise, which is the key to their success: people want to show-off and become “better” than others, even if it’s only for their online presence (they may still suck in the real world). Showing off is perhaps the most important reason people are using social media for.
But since the media itself is an arena where players from every corner of the planet can compete in becoming the coolest person in the universe, the idea of levelling is not absent. Not only does a person’s status increase by the mere number of followers in Twitter, or friends in Facebook, but there are dedicated services like Grader that calculate a score in the range of 1-100 that’s based on how important your online “character” is. Even top user lists are compiled, where people compete to climb up and beat their peeps, in either ethical or “unethical” ways.
Socializing
We all know that prolonged use of computers is supposed to make people less social in real life, but at least the Internet helps people socialize in the online life. WoW is quite fun to play mainly because you get to play along with other players who are not bots but actual persons. You can form a team and beat hard enemies, fight other (real) players of the opposing faction, form “guilds”, chat, and even flirt with them. There have been cases where people met in the game and then got married in the real world (but unfortunately I don’t have reference for this one). The bottom line is that fun comes when interaction with other humans is in play.
Of course, the same applies to social media. You get to chat with your friends or with people you don’t know, become friends with them, flirt with them, get on a date or even marry someone you met online. Although, as in WoW, you never really know the gender or looks of another person as it’s pretty easy to present yourself as something that you’re not.
Time-wasting
One of the main reasons people are condemning WoW players is their severe time-wasting, since they may be playing for many hours every day. But aren’t there Facebook users who spend hours in front of their computers, “socializing” with their friends and spending great amounts of time (and even money) on useless and almost pathetic “applications”? Both activities are huge time-wasters, but it’s still a matter of taste if one fancies spending their time killing virtual beasts, or throwing Britney Spears’ to their buddies and feeding their virtual pets!
Social media are MMORPGs
Examining all the differences, we could say that social media are indeed a form of massively multiplayer online role-playing games. They are used massively by multiple “players” all over the world who go online to create their own “characters” and engage in a role-playing “game”. In both of them, you get to interact with people who you don’t know, compete against them, show how “cool” you are, try to become better and more important than others and gain popularity. There are many new things to do and unknown territories to explore.
Participating in either MMORPGs or social media steals much of your time. Both are worlds of their own, in parallel to ours. They’re both another way for a person to participate in a “non-real” environment where they can show-off as much as their heart desire. Aren’t they all nothing more but different facets of the new multi-dimensional universe we have created, named “The Internet”?
Part of my resolution for the new year was to get things done, stop wasting time and make my plans come true. But after the first working week of 2009, I see that there are still old habits that are plaguing my productivity, as I found myself pondering at the end of the day, why my work didn’t advance as much as I’d want it to.
I came to the conclusion that the main reason that’s hindering my productivity is getting distracted, not away from my computer but inside it! I do spend most of my day (while working) in front of my iMac, sitting in my office, but am I doing what I am supposed to be doing, or am I constantly wasting my time in a never-ending cycle of tedious distractions?
Reading the news, connecting via Twitter, checking on Facebook, reading (and replying to) e-mail the moment it arrives, engaging into some chatting on MSN or googling that thing that occured to me during the previous night while I was trying to sleep is a huge time-waster. All of these tasks seem quite innocent and may require no more than a couple of minutes to perform, yet there’s an urge to do them again and again during the day, which results in a big waste of precious time without realizing it. I guess this applies to many people who work online.
For example, here’s a quick list of thoughts that trigger such actions:
“Hm, what’s going on in Twitterland right now? I’ll only take a quick look.“
“Let’s check my friends’ status on Facebook for a minute.“
“Gotta check the news, maybe there’s something big happening right now, I’ll just scan the headlines.“
“Hm, new mail, gotta check it out, I want my inbox to be empty at all times“
“It’s been some time since I last checked Google analytics, how’s my blog doing lately?“
“Is a replacement for the Epson R2400 out already? Maybe it’s time to get myself a good color printer“
and the list goes on an on and on…
Not only do these things feast on my time, but more importantly even if they’re only distracting me from work for a couple of minutes, I still have to set my mind again into working on the problem that got interrupted, which can cause mental fatigue if it happens too often. So here I am in 2009, postponing all of my great plans until I’m done with some client work that has been already delayed a lot.
I realized that finishing this work for my clients is a big barrier for me, since I can’t dive into anything big (i.e. start developing an iPhone app) until I’m done with it. If I ever want to begin doing all those things that I long to, I have to get over this barrier, get all those distractions out of the way and boost my productivity.
Shutting down the Internet
In order to do this, I have decided to shut down my office Internet router for the week to come, and see how much more (or less!) productive I’ll be by Friday evening. Not being connected to the Internet means that I won’t be able to do any of the aforementioned actions, therefore I’ll be able to focus on my work and, hopefully, get it done after a week’s hard work (it’s a project stuck in 90% for quite some time).
But why go to such extremes? There are other successful ways of getting things done, i.e. batching your actions, time-scheduling etc. True, these methods are quite effective when it comes to minimizing distractions and focusing on work, yet I think that shutting down the Internet for a (working) week will have a much more powerful effect. It’ll be a standard, to which I’ll be able to compare the amount of online time-wasting I’ll be doing when I turn the router back on next week.
So, starting on Monday morning, I’m shutting down my office Internet router and start working in an environment without connectivity. That means that I’ll also have to turn off e-mail auto-fetch in the iPhone and not allow myself to peek into the Internet over 3G! I’ll still check mail once or twice during the day, only to see if there’s something urgent that I need to act on, and I’ll blog about the process daily when I get back home in the evening, but that will be all.
Ah, the Internet! A huge network of interconnected computers allowing users to exchange information of all kinds. It started with chunks of text, e-mail and simple web pages, but as connection lines improved and end-users got more bandwidth (speed) available, file-sharing became a reality: a haven of all the world’s digital riches, be it music, movies or software. That obscure indie band only a dozen of people know of? You can find it’s latest album online, for free. And the latest movies too, even before they hit the screens, for free as well. And if you ever need some kind of software, you don’t have to spend a penny; it’s available on the Internet at no cost.
Everything for free. Of course it’s illegal, but it’s free. File-sharing and peer-to-peer technologies have made this true: Napster, Kazaa, AudioGalaxy, Gnutella, Limewire, Soulseek are only a few of the apps and technologies that enabled users to exchange copyrighted information for free throughout the years. Online piracy increases exponentially, and the big guys (e.g. MPAA, IFPI etc) can do little to stop it. The latest and greatest in file-sharing technology, BitTorrent, has been characterized as a “hydra”, since whenever a file-sharing community is shut down, two or more new ones come into existence.
Let’s face it, people will always share copyrighted material with each other because it saves them money. And it does save a lot of money! For example, if a proud iPod owner would ever want to fill her 160GB iPod Classic with music she had bought online, it would cost her tens of thousands of dollars. But online piracy makes it easier for teens and everyday people who are not millionaires to enjoy thousands of songs in their music devices at no cost. Getting it illegally off the Internet is free, easy and makes the user’s life easier, but the artists and the record companies don’t see it this way. And in the end, they will find a way to win this battle, at least momentarily.
The only way to defeat online piracy
But how can the copyright holders win this battle? it’s easy: by charging the users. That’s right, charge the users for downloading illegal copies of copyrighted work, and if it’s possible, charge them more than the actual cost of buying a legitimate copy of the latest album, or a new movie, or some kind of software. That would put an end to online piracy, and it will. But how can you charge a computer user for downloading something from another user? How could the record companies achieve this?
The record companies cannot do this, but your Internet Service Provider (ISP) can. The Internet has given birth to online piracy because information exchange is “free”; you only pay a small fee to your ISP to gain unlimited access to the Internet and then you are able to download enormous amounts of data, be it legal or illegal — your ISP doesn’t care. But this is about to change since it will benefit both ISP’s and copyright holders, and the moment they realize that a deal is underway that will make them more profitable, the “free” era of the Internet will be over. And we’ll be the lucky ones to have witnessed this free era.
Today, as more greedy users around the world use peer-to-peer technologies to share files, the amount of traffic generated by file-sharing is huge, often utilizing all of a network’s available bandwidth and resources. Since when will ISP’s let their users save tens of thousands of dollars by not buying the stuff they want, but in the same time forcing the ISP’s themselves to spend tens of thousand of dollars to upgrade and improve their networks since there’s high demand for more bandwidth? Not for long, I predict. Especially when the copyright holders will make a deal with them to share profit.
In the near future, your Internet subscription will come with a different policy. You’ll still pay a fee to access the Internet and have unlimited data access to normal or featured content for fair use. But when you use the network for file-sharing, distribution of copyright content, illegal material or other uses, you will be charged for it, by the volume of traffic you create. The key phrases in the last sentence are “fair use”, “featured content” and “other uses”. Essentially, the policy that your ISP will enforce you will read “as long as you use our network to access the Internet for web browsing, e-mail and other things we consider to be fair use, we will not charge you; but if you download copyrighted stuff or do anything else we don’t approve, you will have to pay for every byte of that traffic”.
This is already happening for Internet access over your mobile phone. Do you think you can use your mobile phone’s GPRS access with an unlimited data plan to download the latest and greatest TV shows to your computer for free? Think again! Ian, a poor guy, had that idea, but ended up owing Vodafone 27,000 pounds. This is a true story. Now imagine the same thing applied to all Internet access, be it DSL or cable and you’re getting the idea.
ISP’s are already getting into the game of assisting the battle against online piracy. But filtering data will not offer much, users will utilize cryptography and other means to still cloak their illegal activities. ISP’s and copyright holders will realize that people are going to stop sharing content only at the moment it stops being free. This will stop people from stealing away copyrighted content, force them to buy the stuff they want, and still make ISP’s more profitable by charging those foolish enough to insist on file-sharing in hope that they won’t get caught.
Featured content will still cost nothing to download. This means that, for example, you’ll be able to pay iTunes Music Store the amount of 9,99 euros and download a music album without paying anything to your ISP, since it’s featured content, traffic from a known, legal source. But if you choose to download an illegal copy of the album from, say, BitTorrent, and are charged at a rate of 0.001 euros / kB you’ll end up paying the same amount of money, if not more, and still face the possibility of getting caught and go to jail for your crime. So which option would you choose?
Now think of this: iTunes Music Store drops it’s prices so you get an album for 8 euros. In the same time, ISP’s charge more than 0.001 euro / kB for traffic that is not “fair use”, so downloading the album will cost you 12 euros. It will be cheaper to buy a legitimate copy than download it illegally. The moment this happens, online piracy will die. And the organizations with the fancy acronyms will grin and celebrate their victory, but it will not last long.
The future of the Internet
It is obvious that this will be the end of the Internet as we know it. The Network that started as a military project and soon became the ultimate medium for telecommunications around the globe, will not be as free as it is today. Downloading stuff will cost you bucks. In the years to come, our times will be remembered as those days of the “free” Internet, those times that people were able to download anything for free and we’ll be nostalgically write about it in our future blogs, or whatever blogs will evolve to.
But people will not give up. As soon as the new policies will apply, people will find other means of communicating to each other for free by not using the Internet. Ad-hoc, peer-to-peer wireless networks spanning entire cities already exist and you can join such a network just by placing your wireless access point outside in order to have a good signal. Computer users will start connecting to each other using WiFi, forming a new network that belongs to the users, not ISP’s, since the air is (still) free. This is already happening, but in the future it will be the only way to exchange information for free, so more and more users will join these networks.
More and more of these wireless “darknets” will form, closed communities run by the users, for the users, screening new entries in order to keep the record companies, ISP’s, spies and law enforcement officers away from witnessing the distribution of illegally copied data, thus creating a new haven of free file-sharing. There will still be a need for these networks to become interconnected to each other, and they will do so, by utilizing ground networks that allow them to do so. University networks, for example, or ISPs of “questionable ethics” that will allow the free flow of data for very low monthly fees. A new Network, more chaotic and decentralized than the current Internet that will form a new community for users and a new market for businesses.
And when the “Airnet” of the future will become a reality, copyright holders and organizations will have to defeat online piracy again. Will they be able to regulate wireless communications, or charge for using the air as a medium to transmit signals? Who knows what will happen when the air will become so congested by all the information travelling through it. That is, if there’s still air to breathe and we hadn’t destroyed Earth’s atmosphere by continuing to severely pollute our planet…
We are, indeed, living in interesting times.
Updates
[Jan 16, 2008] Ars Technica recently published an article discussing that filtering is about to become a reality in College networks as well as ISPs, while today it discusses about a debate that takes place on the New York Times, about whether ISPs should be forced to play a vital part in fighting piracy by filtering content, and how this idea is probably going to fail.
[Jan 17, 2008] Ars Technica today writes about a leaked memo indicating that Time Warner Cable is about to apply bandwidth caps to it’s users, initially on a trial basis. I believe that this is a first step towards the scheme I predict in this article, if it finally becomes true. When users will become frustrated about reaching the specified bandwidth caps, they may be given the option to pay extra for more bandwidth, or engage a different policy that will bill them according to the “kind” of traffic they create.
Last night, I woke up after a bad headache around 1 am. My headache was gone, so was my need to sleep. I convinced myself not to get up, so I went on and on swirling around in my bed until 5am. Being unable to sleep, I was thinking about new ideas regarding my website, as well as future services I would like to develop and deploy (maybe this was the reason I couldn’t sleep!).
During this process of mentally designing and organizing my new website, I remembered something I had long forgotten: Google Apps For Your Domain. I don’t want to use Google start pages or Google Chat, but why not use gmail for my e-mail addresses? I decided that I had watched enough distant lights of the passing cars through the highway (plus the night train passing by — the railroad is parallel to the highway at the area I can see from my window), so I got up and opened an account to Google Apps for my domain.
Delegating your e-mail addresses to Google is simple: all you have to do is delete the existing MX records from your domain, and add the proper MX records for the Google servers (all found in the instructions). Then you just wait for the service to get ready (from the side of Google). In less than one hour, I could log-in to my e-mail account through a subdomain on my own domain (e.g. like webmail.karageorgakis.com), in a gmail-like interface. Nice! But why should someone do this in the first place?
Web space
The #1 reason that may come to most people’s minds is web space. Yes, 2GB of storage per e-mail account is a nice feature. It does sound like a lot of storage for a free e-mail account (like gmail), since the service appears to be quite generous to provide (practically) every Internet user with that much of space. But having a hosting package of 100GB to host my e-mail accounts, space is not a problem. I could as well not delete messages for a long long time, until my space was full. So, web space is nice, but not the most useful reason for moving your mail to Google.
Search functionality
The second characteristic that comes to mind after web space, is Google’s search functionality, and this is what they’re really good with. If there’s anyone on our planet that can provide us with smart mechanisms to search through any data, and come up with fast and accurate results, then it’s none other that this search giant. How many times did you strive to find that colleague’s e-mail that was sent months (or years) ago, through vanilla plain search provided by Entourage (or Outlook, for Windows users), with no effect? Google mail makes this efficient and simple at the same time. Most gmail users are (or should be) already familiar of the way one can search e-mail in gmail.
First of all, in the simplest case, you type a word and hit search, and there you go: instant search results of all mail that contain occurrences of the word either in the subject, sender address or body of the message – no need to specify where it should search for the word. You can always fine grain your search by using the proper modifiers, like “from” etc. By combining all these modifiers, the user is capable of limiting the search results to just those few (or just the proper one) messages he was really looking for. Most of us, however (not excluding myself) do not remember all of the search modifiers gmail provides, simply because we never really need them —plain search does the job well. But if we need to go deeper, Google mail gives us the power to do so.
World-wide accessibility
One other advantage of using Google mail for your e-mail, is accessibility. Sure, every hosting package comes with some sort of webmail, but I have not yet found one that’s as accessible and efficient as Google mail. It is supported by all browsers. And please, don’t tell me about Safari not supporting all the features — who is using Google chat anyway when we all use MSN Messenger? Plus, it’s always a benefit when you find yourself strangled in a place with no computer and in need of accessing your e-mail with your mobile phone. I’m sure that most webmail apps don’t work well (if they work at all) through a primitive phone browser (by primitive I mean almost all phone browsers, with the exception of the iPhone and maybe Nokia’s latest one which I haven’t used yet). Google mobile mail scores very well in this area.
It’s a time machine!
It’s spacey, it finds what you need and you can use it from almost everywhere in the planet. But there’s something more subtle that’s equally (or even more) important, that may not come to mind instantly. It’s none other than time invariability in your e-mails. With enough web space to keep all of your important (and fun) messages, you rarely have to delete any. This means that messages that have been sent to you yours ago, are still there.
Back to last night’s oddysey: after I set up my e-mail accounts and forwarding, I could now access all of my e-mail addresses through just one: my gmail address. I have to admit, though, that my inbox was quite messy, so I had to clean things up. Being obsessive-compulsive in keeping things in my life neat and tidy, I cannot help but feel the urge to apply this obsession in electronic stuff too — like files and e-mails. So I went on to either label, delete or archive messages, starting from the end of the mailbox, all the way to last minute’s message. The dawn was greeting me with faint sunrays, reminding me that I should get back to bed before the new day comes for good. But an obession is hard to beat: I had to clean up my inbox, and so I did.
It stroke me when I found out that I was looking to a brief history of my life throughout the past few years! Google-mail time for me was starting back when I was in Chania, Crete, finishing my master’s. A lot of correspondence with my supervisor and colleagues about my thesis. Messages to friends, describing how sad I was to leave Crete, after getting the master’s. News from my cousin, Paulina, while at her journey through Europe with InterRail — Paris, Madrid, Lisbon. Old jokes friends have sent to me and I had forgotten, old projects I was working on, some were successful, some where never finished. But what really stroke me the most was my girlfriend’s e-mail while I was at the basic training camp, when I joined the army, kept inside there for 24 days with my mobile phone being the only window to the outside world.
I reached the last message, phew! That took some time, but it was fun! I never thought that the process of cleaning up my gmail inbox would indeed be an epitome of the last years of my life! Some messages were pretty useless, but I felt the need to archive them; they shall have sentimental value sometime in the future. Who knows how much longer I am going to use my gmail address? Will it be forever? I doubt that Google will ever stop the service, and it’s highly improbable that it will stop being free — at least for the basic version. As long as the service is provided and I don’t quit this account, more and more details of my life, ranging from important steps in my career to silly “hello” messages, fragments of my real life will continue to get imprinted in the non-material time machine that’s called web space (or call it cyberspace if you like).
Nothing’s absolutely free…
Unfortunately, having a time machine like this comes with a cost, not in currency, but in privacy. An e-mail account is not a stronghold or an absolutely safe vault in which you can store valuable information. It’s not that hard for some third-party to have access to it, and this means access to all of this information: who you really are, who you’re hanging out with, what you do; what worries you and what makes you happy; where you are at any given time and your plans for the future, details about your everyday life like phone numbers and real addresses; it’s all in there.
What would happen if someone had access to all this information about us? The time machine that e-mail accounts constitute, is all the missing information that our blogs lack, the “glue” that could give insight about our lives, reveal all those things we tag “personal” and even expose our darkest secrets. Can we really imagine the power that is in the hands of those, who have all this information about thousands of people’s lives? And do we know, how they are going to use it?
No, we can’t imagine, and we don’t know. But does it really matter, when we are willingly posting on the Net so much information about ourselves, our lives, our contacts and our social networks? When we upload photos of ourselves and of our friends and families? When we boast about the music we like to listen and the movies we enjoyed the most? Perhaps, we should be less afraid of what others could do with the information that doesn’t belong to them, but begin to shake our heads about the information we are willingly and knowingly giving them day by day…
