NightBlogger

BBC—Children growing up alongside the rise of social networking websites may have a “potentially dangerous” view of the world, says a leading psychiatrist. Dr Himanshu Tyagi said sites such as Facebook and MySpace may be harmful. He told the Royal College of Psychiatrists annual meeting people with active online identities might place less value on their real lives. And the West London Mental Health NHS Trust expert added this could raise the risk of impulsive acts or even suicide.

“It’s a world where everything moves fast and changes all the time, where relationships are quickly disposed at the click of a mouse, where you can delete your profile if you don’t like it, and swap an unacceptable identity in the blink of an eye for one that is more acceptable.” He said: “People used to the quick pace of online social networking may soon find the real world boring and unstimulating. More

Photo Derrick

Monster.com founder Jeff Taylor helped you find a job, and helped ease you into middle age. Now he wants to help you build the last web page you’ll ever need. Tributes.com is scheduled for a soft launch in June. It aims to provide a central location to house online memorials for those who have passed on. It’s starting with $4.3 million in funding, with The Wall Street Journal as a lead investor. Taylor, who retired from Monster.com in 2005, says Monster was intended to take the jobs section of newspaper’s classified ads online. So online obituaries seemed like an inevitable next step.
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Brain scan studies have for the first time identified brain circuitry associated with social status, according to researchers at the National Institute of Mental Health of the National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland. They found that different brain areas are activated when a person moves up or down in a pecking order - or simply views perceived social superiors or inferiors. An impending social shift produced similar changes to winning money in the brain’s “value centre”. A fall in status activated circuitry known to process emotional pain and frustration. Read more

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John A. Smith writes in The Journal Sentinel ,

The good professor Andrew Yarrow, opining from his cozy ivory tower, says that, as an act of selfless patriotism, Americans should work until mere moments before they expire, giving every last breath for Benevolent American Industry (”Early retirement is unpatriotic,” April 12). Gee, I thought our “shorter-lived, poorer grandparents” wanted us to have better lives with more leisure time. Americans already work more hours per week and take less vacation time than any other industrialized country - at jobs many of us despise, buoyed only by the prospect of early retirement.

Mr. Yarrow lays out some convincing arguments against early retirement, but if he thinks collecting early on the money baby boomers were forced to pay into Social Security is unpatriotic, tough. The guv’ment shouldn’t have taken the money to begin with. Besides, who can afford to retire early?

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Glenn Derene wrote an interesting piece titled, “How Social Networking Could Kill Web Search as We Know It”. He suggests that “with the rise of social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Second Life, LinkedIn and even Google’s own Orkut, the next generation of Web users may find what they want by using their social network rather than a search algorithm”.

He points out that because we are already “meta-tagging ourselves through our social networking memberships, shopping habits and surfing addictions, it’s conceivable that the information could attempt to find us…it could tumble through the various filters you set up around your identity and then show up on your home-page news feed, or in your in box, or pop up on a ticker that follows you around as you browse from page to page.”

I don’t think there’s any question about it; that’s exactly what’s going to happen. What comes to mind is the science fiction film, Zardoz. I don’t refer to the plot, but rather the technological device employed by the film’s characters.

Each character in Zardoz wore a ring that served as a communication device connecting all of society’s members audiovisually, much like our camera phones today. Issues and decisions were presented and voted on simultaneously by each member of the film’s futuristic society whose structure was horizontal (like social networking sites), not vertical as in today’s corporate structure outside the Web. Add talking billboards to the scenario, as was depicted in the film Blade Runner, or a talking medicine cabinet with a voice asking “What’s wrong?” when the cabinet door opens like in THX1138, and that’s Western culture in 10-20 years.

In the future, upon opening my car door in the morning, I could here a speech engine try and sell me something through my car’s GPS navigation system, or a targeted radio add based on my prior evening’s Web searches.

Read Glenn Derene’s article here