The Emotion-Ellipsis Generation: Connecting the emotional dots of text communications.
Q: What, if any, cultural norms, ways of life, practices or beliefs will people who live 100 10 years from now look back and say, “How did they tolerate that?”
Emotion-Ellipsis Generation: Impersonal Impressions & Emotional Connections Gone Awry.
How can two people connect the “emotional dots” in this day of brief, text-based, communications? Communication of events, happenings and impromptu informal texts fail to depict circumstance, personality and emotion. 100 10 years from now, people will look back and will have realized how an unlimited text messaging plan or updating status’ every hour contributed to a loss in personal impressions, lack of deeper memories, and emotional connections gone awry.
If someone rarely got a second chance to make a first impression before this period of text-based messages then preceding challenging social interactions with textual glimpses of character gives only one chance to make that impression. Furthermore, this one-and-only impression could now already have been heavily biased toward what has been implied, inferred or concluded from another brief text of an impersonal nature. Understandably, people develop differently to overcome interpersonal social obstacles but making a habit out of utilizing impersonal text-based means to interact with others may hinder the ability to continually improve on meaningful impressions. Impersonal impressions through text means do not accurately reflect someone’s personality in its entirety. Someone may be genuine and display personal thoughts but being a product of brevity complemented by the lack of voice inflection, tone, expression and demeanor leaves others guessing until they get that chance to witness it in person—for the first and possibly the last time, if at all.
A lasting connection can be made by various means but investing time in understanding, maintaining and improving a relationship is certainly an essential aspect to sustaining one. The evolution of understanding emotion within a sustained connection is pivotal to making sure it does not go awry. Wikipedia cites that emotion is associated with mood, temperament, personality and disposition. Emotion is more so a behavioral cause and effect that is best experienced rather than described via impromptu text-based means. Ensuring that the circumstances surrounding an important event are witnessed and observed allow for that deeper one-on-one connection instilled by more than the circumstantial but the perception of emotion, passion, feeling and thoughtfulness.
When two people have to rely on discerning what is implied from text-based communication, they widen that gap where it becomes increasingly harder to connect the emotional dots when trying to create, let alone maintain a lasting interpersonal relationship. This emotional ellipsis will define this era of text-based communication and will be what people look back on as the underlying reason for the lack of relationships that failed to evolve over time.
-Excerpts from an essay I personally wrote and chose to post based on the article from @IntelFuturist’s article (@HuffPostTech http://t.co/maKA1eTv). And yes, I do believe lax privacy laws and the social media companies that profit off of unchallenged information sharing/storing will steal y[our] daughters’ and sons’ privacy rights. A side-effect will also be the fact they may be socially inept…
Don’t Let Privacy Law Get Stuck in ‘86: Demand a Digital Upgrade to the Electronic Communications Privacy Act https://action.eff.org/o/9042/p/dia/action/public/?action_KEY=8225
"Stores have long wanted to track consumers but following atoms is a lot harder than following bits."
Big Brother Is Watching You Shop [Article]
“Retailers are linking security cameras with software to track consumer behavior [via the phone in y[our] pocket]”
iOCDers, please read this excerpt from the article:
“Some retailers are installing gear to track shoppers via cell phones. Path Intelligence, a company in Portsmouth, England, started selling a technology in 2009 that records a phone’s cellular signal and follows its owner through a building. Today it’s used primarily by malls in Europe, and the company says its technology records the paths of more than 1 million customers every day. Some retailers use the data to figure out where in a mall to place their stores, says Path Intelligence CEO Sharon Biggar. Others use it to find out the nationality of their visitors using the country code at the start of their phone numbers.”
So, in other words, with your phone on you are being tracked by something/someone…
How much is Y[OUR] information worth to companies we like or are loyal to?
Reminder to everyone freely posting to social media. Y[OUR] information, loyalty and opinion is worth something. Control and manage who receives it, on Y[OUR] terms. Benefit from it as well.
How much is Y[OUR] information worth? Brita compensates us $2.00 if we register for reminders when providing first and last name, date of birth, email and preferred place of purchase. …5 data fields (not counting IP, etc)
Have an example of when someone offers you money for your personal information? Send it! I’ll post these as I come across them to remind you that you’re valuable—don’t just put it all out there. And no, I did not register. Clorox (Brita’s parent company) has an extremely complex privacy policy that grants too much information outside the exact scope of what they requested of me through the Brita filter campaign.
Facebook Reminder: Your name is available (and more if you unknowingly make things public by ‘Liking’ the product pages. Also, if you connect to the multitude of apps out there, you are freely sharing these likes and giving those random companies free reign to use, aggregate and possibly sell your information.
What To Do: Spam Txt Msg with Phishing Link
Spammer: iPhone text from (347) 313-8577 - “You have been randomly selected for a BestBuy christmas gift. Get your free $1000 BB gift card here bit.ly/BestBuyXmas.”
iOCDer: I then proceed to “Unshorten.It” with my Unshorten.it firefox extension to see where/who is phishing and spamming me. I then see that Unshorten.it says it’s an untrustworthy [picture here] source from trk.acotrk.com. This source is also being blocked in my HOSTs file too. So I’d have been ok if I clicked on the link unknowingly. Got your HOSTs file set up? No? Set it up now.
iOCDer: First, I forward the text to AT&T - SPAM (7726).
AT&T Text Response: AT&T FREE MSG: Thanks for providing us with the content of an unwanted message. Now, reply with the sender’s phone number so we know who sent you this message.
iOCDer: 347-313-8577
AT&T: Free Message - Thank you, we appreciate your assistance.
iOCDer: I then ALSO report the spam Bit.ly url link to Bit.ly via Abuse[(at)]Bit.ly
Bit.ly: In less than 5 minutes a support person responds with “Thanks for this report! We appreciate it. We’ve blocked this link on our end.
Best,
Bit.ly Employee (actual name intentionally left out for privacy.
(What happens when they block it and someone clicks on the link)
iOCDer: *happy dance* because I feel i did something good by reporting this to all that were involved as well as informing y’all of what to do.
*Side note: AT&T and other phone companies do not allow us to blanket-block random phone numbers. In an ideal world, I could have my entire address book be the verifying source for the acceptance of any/all text messages but AT&T doesn’t want to do that. However, Google Voice does allow this and I’ve slowly switched over to using a free/non-primary GV number to give out to 2nd and non-personal contacts so I can block them with ease.
If you are not paying for the product, you are the product.
Source: plus.google.com
Anyone can watch you on a public WiFi network; protect yourself.
It is simple to see all unencrypted traffic on an unprotected/untrusted WiFi network.
This is just a simple addon for Firefox that is freely available for anyone to download so that they can hijack your personal accounts while you’re using a public WiFi network. …imagine the other programs. I use a personal VPN and always try to force full HTTPS: connections.
It’s extremely common for websites to protect your password by encrypting the initial login, but surprisingly uncommon for websites to encrypt everything else. This leaves the cookie (and the user) vulnerable. HTTP session hijacking (sometimes called “sidejacking”) is when an attacker gets a hold of a user’s cookie, allowing them to do anything the user can do on a particular website. On an open wireless network, cookies are basically shouted through the air, making these attacks extremely easy. - http://codebutler.com/firesheep
How it works:
Read about how Computer World’s Sharon Machlis hijacked her friend’s accounts [link].
What you can do:
- Use a personal VPN. Again, “If you’re not paying for the product, you are [someone’s] product.” I use Witopia’s Personal VPN but there are many, google them. Witopia allows me to use the same account for my computer(s) and my iPhone for ~$70/year.
- Up & Coming way when NOT on your personal VPN connected Mac/PC: Utilize a plug-in dongle called a SurfEasy USB Stick when traveling without your personal computer. Read about it - I backed it [link].
- Use the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s HTTPS Everywhere Firefox addon to ‘assist’ you with using known HTTPS connections (when available but not readily switched on or used).
- Don’t surf every site under the sun when using a public WiFi hotspot. Just do what you need to do (preferably under https) like your banking and get out.
Q: A 5MB Harddrive from 1956 can hold how much of Y[OUR] personal info?
A: FYI - The Oxford English Dictionary (every known/recognized English word) is only 7MB. The Websters is 3.5MB. Further proof why y[our] social media personal information is being collected, scraped and mined with ease and stored.
Block (free): Ads, Malware, Tracking, Spyware, Parasites & most hijackers.
“You can use a HOSTS file to block ads, banners, 3rd party Cookies, 3rd party page counters, web bugs, and even most hijackers. This is accomplished by blocking the connection(s) that supplies these little gems.”
The Hosts file contains the mappings of IP addresses to host names. This file is loaded into memory (cache) at startup, then Windows checks the Hosts file before it queries any DNS servers, which enables it to override addresses in the DNS. This prevents access to the listed sites by redirecting any connection attempts back to the local (your) machine. Another feature of the HOSTS file is its ability to block other applications from connecting to the Internet, providing the entry exists.” - MVPS.org
Remember: javascript, cookies, flash and html5 can still track you and that is why I use what I outlined in my previous post in addition to having an up-to-date HOSTS file loaded.
Mac OS:
- Read about the HOSTs file from MVPS.org.
- Download the up-to-date hosts file: http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.txt
- Download GasMask: https://code.google.com/p/gmask/
- Note: GasMask has not been updated for lion but works pretty well for me. It may crash but the hosts file stays updated. After you install/launch it, it shows up in the top menu bar. Click on the icon then click open “Show Editor Window.” I’ve donated and you should too if you find it useful.
- Remember: Mac must have these four items in the HOSTs file but gasmask usually puts them there.
127.0.0.1 localhost
255.255.255.255 broadcasthost
::1 localhost
fe80::1%lo0 localhost
Windows:
- Follow windows instructions. I use the batch file that the MVPS.org website hosts and works great. http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.htm
