May 2011 – maneeshpangasa

To start off this blog I’d just like to say the web is really an amazing and transformative way to communicate and share information. Having grown up during the 1980s and 1990s and having seen new web based technologies that helped contribute to the decline of traditional print media and rise of new online and social media tools I am often fascinated with emerging technologies and their impact on society. At the same time I worry about the emergence of personalized filter bubbles only displaying pleasing and personally relevant information to each user since reading Eli Pariser‘s book “The Filter Bubble: What The Internet is Hiding From You” that undermine the purpose of an Open Internet. You see filter bubbles make the web more isolated as users form their own Circles in Google+ or lists in Facebook of friends they start interacting with those users and are cut off from everyone else. Considering the Internet is a global advanced telecommunications network that lets users from anywhere in the world freely communicate and share information online if social networks are isolating us from others not in our Circles or friends lists are they really social or anti social?

Mobile communications and the rise of the mobile web are also having a transformative effect upon society. In the era of the mobile Internet, users can update their Facebook, Twitter, My Space, Google+ status via text message, using mobile applications for Android, iOS, Blackberry, WebOS or Windows Mobile devices as well as the mobile websites of these social networks. Web publishing and authoring tools like Tumult’s Hype on the Mac App Store that enable users to create rich interactive web content experiences using HTML 5 animations are also nice. Platforms like Facebook, Google+, and sites like WordPress.com and Examiner.com reduce the need for using web hosting companies services to publish and host your own sites to the web. However, some of these sites have closed platforms and use proprietary technology to lock-in users to their sites. Privacy issues and control or lack thereof of your information on some of these sites might make some users reluctant to share information on these sites. As a result new alternatives like the open source Diaspora a social network whose mission is to be more open and respectful of user privacy than Facebook are gradually emerging online. If your interested in staying up to date with all of my work I often blog for Examiner.com also as their Yuma Culture & Events Examiner. Furthermore, you can find me on Google’s Blogger service also and I am currently working on creating a website using Google Sites.