We are our own Big Brother

New developments in social media and technology make more and more of your private life public

Social media offers up a way for people to express themselves in ways never possible, but like Uncle Ben told a young Peter Parker, “With great power comes great responsibility.”  Information that used to be difficult or impossible to find, people now freely offer up. Over the course of this week, my Internet prowling unearthed some new trends that made me wonder if social media wasn’t starting to ask me to put too much of my life out in the public domain.

We can now make it easier than ever for people stalk and track us. Check out the new SenseCam. This little gadget is designed to capture pretty much every aspect of your life on camera. You wear it around your neck and its fisheye lens takes a picture every 30 seconds. It’s easy to see the appeal – there’s potential for a whole lot of wonderful images and moments from your life to be captured that would otherwise be missed if you hands are otherwise occupied.

Somehow the thought of a whole lot of people walking around with these things taking automated pictures all the time makes me just a little uneasy.

Now combine that with SoundBiter, a new iPhone app that constantly records the world around it. This nifty little app constantly records all audio around you. If you hear something you want to share, you hit a button and the phone saves the last 60 seconds of audio. You can then instantly send it out to the world via Twitter.

This could be a fun party app but the potential for paparazzi to exploit celebrities they are stalking or for people to be quoted out of context means there is great damage it could do.

Another trend that’s taking advantage of technology’s watchful eye are location based services (LBS) like the new Google Latitude. Thanks to built-in GPS, most new phones know where you are all the time . Developers are creating apps to show you nearby locations of people in your network.

With automated alerts when someone you know is close by, don’t be surprised if your friends suddenly start popping up a lot more often when you’re out and about.

As if that wasn’t enough ways to expose ourselves, here is my personal favorite. This new scale guilts you into losing weight by Tweeting how heavy you are automatically when you step on it. The Internet has officially invaded your bathroom.

The brilliance of social media and technology is that it you can share your life with people in ways never before possible. If you want to stay in the loop, putting a whole lot of yourself out there is inevitable. After all, that’s the spirit of social media. But the question is how much should we share? Is the rapid advancement in social media technologies putting too much of our lives online? Perhaps, but these gadgets sure do look cool.

Jason
Ross is a copywriter for The Duffy Agency. He loves working on both
traditional and social media projects and speculating on the future of
the ad industry.