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(Un)Social Media - Facebook Places and Blind Faith

I love Facebook and Social Media...I'm never off the thing, the fact that this technology exists has opened so many channels personally, academically, socially and professionally for me. Many a new facial expressions have been created, stemming from the utterance of those 4 dreaded words....."I'M NOT ON FACEBOOK"....those pictures get uploaded too if you're quick enough with the camera.

I've even heard this "I don't trust anyone who isn't on Facebook".

These are the days where a broken laptop doesn't bring fear into our hearts because we haven't saved that word document but because we wont be able to use the internet for social networking. Thanks God (apple) for smartphones, eh. Social networking on the move....excellent.

So, imagine my surprise when I heard about the latest installment in the Facebook ploy to connect the world when I had read a piece of "fiction" not 6 months earlier which touched on the same technology and portrayed it as Big Brother gone mad...insane even!

Facebook Places is the new app in the Facebook family allowing your friends (or if you're not careful how you set your privacy - EVERYONE) to see where you are in real time. Amazing technology. Fantastic concept. Brave by Facebook to take the lead.

YES - you can disable the app
YES - nothing visual is portrayed

BUT - this is new technology and it can only get 'better', so what is next?
Are facebook paving the way for life blogs in the form of 24 hour life surveillance broadcastable to EVERYBODY?

Social networking is the present and the future......but is this a step too far as far as privacy goes?

Can i persuade you to read a book by Ben Elton called Blind Faith a black-comedy set in post-apocalyptic London. (personally I think he over exageratted the time setting so as not to scare people that this type of stuff isn't too far away)

Ill include the blurb below and let you have a read but before you do can I lead you back to a statement I heard,

"I don't trust anyone who isn't on Facebook"....do you?

BLURB:

As Trafford Sewell struggles to work through the usual crowds of commuters, he is confronted by the
intimidating figure of his Parish Confessor. Why has Trafford not been streaming his every moment of
sexual intimacy onto the community website like everybody else? Does he think he's different or
special in some way? Better than his fellow man and woman? Does he have something to hide?

Imagine a world where everyone knows everything about everybody. Where what a person 'feels' and 'truly believes' is protected under the law, while what is rational, even provable is condemned as heresy. A world where to question ignorance and intolerance is to commit a Crime against Faith. Imagine it. Or just wait until After The Flood.

Ben Elton's dark, savagely comic novel imagines a post-apocalyptic society where religious intolerance combines with a confessional sex obsessed, self-centric culture to create a world where nakedness is modesty, ignorance is wisdom and privacy is a dangerous perversion. It offers a chilling vision of what's to come? Or something rather closer to what we call reality?