Cellular Technology Has Changed The Way We Perceive The World. | The Communication Blog

Sunday, August 23, 2009

Cellular Technology Has Changed The Way We Perceive The World.

By Marilyn Tokomo

The world has become an interesting place. We've seen a lot of changes in the way society looks at certain things. Yesterday's taboos are today's accepted practices. This is especially true in North America. For example things like gay marriage and marijuana legalization could not be imagined during the 50s, but today it's a reality in certain states.

Internal factors such as technological advancements played a big role in these developments. The power of centralized electronic archives and the world wide web made our lives easier. In the past you had to manually search for a paper document if you were looking for information. Now the desired information is two clicks away (sometimes even one). Another advantage is that back up systems are made and stored in different locations, which means that fires no longer threaten the existence of information.

Unfortunately there is another side to this coin. These depositories of information might be hacked from distance. It makes our personal information vulnerable to rogue attacks. No matter how secure the system is, there will always be a smart hacker. It's scary, but it doesn't mean we should revert back to stone age, because there are many examples of how technology can help regular people access large databases. Let's take telephone number lookup as an example.

It allows a person to run a simple reverse telephone number lookup and find out who the owner of a telephone number is. Potential benefits of this service are amazing. For example 800 reverse phone lookup services allow a person to find out the name of the organization that called. Or a person can run a reverse cell phone lookup to find out who is harassing him or her over the phone.

Unfortunately this innocent service can be used in a bad way. A person who is using reverse telephone lookup might be a stalker too. He might be looking up information about a person who is not returning his phone calls. But where do we draw the line? This is a perverted mix of freedom of information and potential for privacy violation.

I think that every person should have a say in this matter. If we don't have our say, our privacy might be taken away bit by bit. Imagine waking up one day to a world where privacy is a secondary notion. And when that stage is reached, it's often a done deal which is hard to reverse. Even the smallest representatives (on the municipal level) should be listened to at the highest of levels in order to prevent this from happening, because your privacy does matter.

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