Attention seekers

People are extremely conflicted beings. On one hand, they yearn for attention from the masses, yet on the other, they view privacy critically. We share photos and personal information on social networking portals such as Facebook, Friendster and blogs with the main motive of letting others know about what we have done and what we are going about in our personal lives. We do not tell our target audience about our lives personally but secretly harbour the hope that they will come around your Facebook page to take a look at your lives. We want people to know yet we do not take the initiative to tell them. Blocking public access to your online page cuts down the number of people that have the knowledge of the happenings in your lives. But when we have cut down that number to a meagre few, wouldn’t it be easier to just update them personally or just send them the pictures instead of hoping that they will one day drop by your online profile page.

I feel that new media has a huge part to play in creating the desire in us to share such intimate information with the public. In the past when there weren’t any computers and the Internet wasn’t even born, people still had the initiative to catch up with each other face-to-face over a cup of tea. Right now, you feel that you know a person and his/her life when in actual fact, you’ve only scanned through their Facebook photos. So tell me, what is the definition of friends in our modern world?

Isolated from the world

I’m personally experiencing the exact phenomenon described in one of those Monday new media lectures – the over-reliance on new media and their systems. Left my house today WITHOUT my precious diamond. As in handphone (it’s a HTC diamond anyway.) It was my first time leaving home without it and it feels horrible. The sudden detachment from the communications world, isolated from others. It made me think about how it would be like for the people in the past.

Have man and machines integrated into one so much until we have developed such a strong reliance on them? It makes us question whether machines and new media have made us slaves to them instead of us being their masters. Back before the rampant existence of technology and new media among our society, we did not have to think about the possibilities of anything going wrong just because on was uncontactable , simply because everyone was just as uncontactable as the rest.

So has the developments of technology turned into a bane instead of its original intention of a boon? I believe we cannot fully blame the progress of technology on such a phenomenon. We have been on the road for progress and striving for the main aim of making life better from the very beginning of mankind.

The Spread of Scandals

The speed at which news spread these days is astounding, supported by the rapid developments in new media. News, especially scandals, spread faster than it had in the past. Take for example the Jack Neo scandal. Within days, everyone is talking about it and commenting about it in more ways than one. Each day, a new allegation springs up and is reported through various different mediums with the news spreading through the Internet at the fastest rate.

Besides the common knowledge among the people, we as outsiders are also able to comment on the issue and voice our views through the exact same medium used to convey the news. And this is exactly what I am doing right now. New media gives the sense that we too, are heavily involved to the extent that Jack Neo himself feels obliged to apologise to the public. I would like to ask this question : What has his scandals got to do with us?