Technology

Okay, I know that you're not supposed to say this until you're a grandmother, but I am so fed up with technology. I was just on a site that asked me to connect with meebo. What is a meebo? Is it contagious? Between RSS feeds, redundant apps, the google vs. everyone else war, it's just too much! We can't create separate identities for ourselves within every company's attempt at a social networking site. What if I fill out my facebook profile when I'm in a good mood, but my google+ profile in a bad mood. Those are two different virtual people being represented by the same physical person. Will I feel dissonance when I realize my two virtual personalities contradict each other?

Yes, I'm very sick of having to keep up with the latest thing when I can't even figure out what the latest thing IS, but there are definitely some parts of this culture that I think are very cool. For one thing, open source systems. Open source technology means everyone has access to the code of a system, so anyone (at least who knows what they're doing) can improve upon it. Have you ever used the Firefox browser? Open source. It really fosters creativity and ingenuity when any joe schmo can take ownership in it and work out glitches. But if you're anything like me, perhaps you had this thought run through your mind: Anyone can change it? What about people who are going to sabotage it? I've thought that a lot. But the thing is, they don't. Instead of one single company standing guard on the system, you've got people everywhere fixing vulnerabilities and making the systems safer than ever. And my Firefox browser has never stopped working. It has continually gotten better. It comes from a community of people who want to make a great system. This is just one example of countless projects like this. Most of us who regularly work on computers use at least one OSS application, if not many. We trust them. It makes me wonder if, thanks to this phenomenon, we are less cynical today than we were 10 or 15 years ago. I like to think that we are, that at least in one small way technology has been more of a virtue than a vice, even in the most moral sense.