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Global Villages and Privacy

The closing line of this NYT article on leaving a digital trail behind us, quotes Thomas W. Malone, director of the M.I.T. Center for Collective Intelligence quotes as saying :
“For most of human history, people have lived in small tribes where everything they did was known by everyone they knew,” Dr. Malone said. “In some sense we’re becoming a global village. Privacy may turn out to have become an anomaly.”
How true ! Indeed the concept of privacy is so new that it still needs to be explained to our our parents and grandparents. It was only when the real villages had ceased to be the hubs of society and the global digital village had come to take its place, that the concept of privacy came to exist. To the professor's point, there will be little room or need for privacy once the global village mimics the social patterns of the real villages - it will at that point become an anomaly.
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workhard said…
Privacy has become very elemental in the youth, it is going to be difficult for them to cope.
3:42 PM
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