OK. So I have a wee bit of conspiracy theorist in me. . . When my last silly post on Louis Vuitton disappeared from my little ol' blog overnight, I was mighty suspicious. Does Google have some kind of thought police that removes posts criticizing advertisers in any way? Did I offend the higher powers that be who had some sort of vested interest in Louis Vuitton? I don't trust Google to begin with, and my mind was conjuring up the many ways I might have violated some sort of blog posting policy (who reads the fine print, anyway??).
So I was wrong. Just a minor hiccup at Blogger when they were doing routine maintenance (or so they say. . .).
But seriously, sometimes all this tech stuff really creeps me out. Especially when you know that every post is analyzed to the n-th degree by some computer algorithm to maximize Google profits. I was reading a Facebook post by a friend just yesterday and she was noticing how the ads on her homepage kept changing with every comment she made. After a while, she started throwing words out there, and the ads just kept keeping pace with whatever she said. SCARY. It's a little too much like that Tom Cruise movie from a while back who's name eludes me, where advertisements on walls and billboards greeted him by name as he was walking past, trying to lure him into buying "stuff."
All this, of course is aimed at consumerism and commercial consumption. Don't get me wrong. I am a firm believer in Capitalism and the free market system, but when reality starts mimicking fiction from only a short while ago, it really makes one pause to think about it all.
The fact of the matter is that, increasingly, we are losing our freedoms on many fronts. Even while blogs we can create for free from the comfort of our homes in our pajamas give us all a platform to spout off whatever we care to throw out there, we must be mindful that all of this is recorded for perpetuity. Once it is "out there" we can't take it back. And it may, in some way, come back to bite us someday.
SCARY.
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