This week’s class material gave me food for thought. As the article “Will the Book Survive Generation Text,” asks: “…are we worse for not having archived the ephemera of mankind, for having devoted libraries and syllabi to books-the weightiest, most important, most enduring forms of communication?…Save and study the substantive, don’t worry about the insignificant” (Becker). This traditional perspective is similar to my own, however I realize that it does not completely address the issues in our society any longer. As our society undergoes radical changes so to must our definition of the insubstantial or meaningless. For instance, all the “ephemera of mankind” such as tweets, Facebook statuses and blogs can be collected, organized and saved. Potentially, this could become a text in and of itself, worthy of consideration; however it also poses a danger.

As we watched in the Digital Dossier by Digital Natives showed an imaginary man Andy and how his whole life is replicated on the internet. This is a change that Gibson explores in Johnny Mnemonic, as Johnny reflects, “We’re an information economy. They teach you that in school. What they don’t tell you is that it’s impossible to move, to live, to operate at any level without leaving traces, bits, seemingly meaningless fragments of personal information. Fragments that can be retrieved, amplified…” (Gibson 66). As Gibson anticipates there is a lucrative business angle to collecting this information. Although a relatively harmless case, every time I update my Facebook status I get improved advertisements specially tailored to my interests or Google conveniently saves my email address for me. Both Facebook and Google already serve as a kind of proto-Johnny storing bits and pieces of our lives. Despite Google’s promise to “Be a responsible steward of the information we hold.” That seems like a lot of trust to place with one company.