Cristal Zeas
Professor Rogoff
FYE 1320
April 1, 2014
Sharing is Caring In present day society, individuals dedicate their time to social media on the internet and electronics, towards updating statuses, rebloging pictures, favoriting videos, reading up on current events, and staying connected in general. It’s only been 25 years since Tim Burners-Lee invented the world wide web and it’s no secret that it is one of the most progressive and influential invention of our time. Dave Eggers, in his current book The Circle, foretells his version of what can happen with the growth of technology and social media and pushes our current standard of being virtually connected from the main social networks Facebook, Twitter, Google, and Tumblr. In
Because of the unfortunately true fact that Snowden has revealed, privacy and technology are up for question it’s influence on society in the future. This is a more modern approach of the futuristic one Eggers portrays in this book. Mae is quickly indoctrinated into the company’s philosophy: everyone has an inviolable right to all information, private or otherwise. That is, all data that has ever been collected (and it’s a moral imperative that all data must be collected and digitalized) should be centralized and freely available to all to peruse at their leisure: purchasing histories, medical records, family photos, fridge contents, personal diary entries, even internet browser histories, therefore making Mae a symbolized character of everyone that wishes to take these steps into technology and be used as a “check-up” as a norm. As mentioned by Rick Searel in his article, there are rules today that can regulate and prevent the events occurring in The Circle. The law effectively prohibits authorities from searching your home without a warrant and probable cause, something authorities have been “technologically” able to do since we started living in shelters. Phone tapping, without a warrant and probable cause, has been prohibited to authorities in the US since the late 1960s -authorities have been tapping phones since shortly after the phone was invented. The problem today is that “no warrant is required for the