Today I saw an ad for a video called “Stranger Safety.” It’s supposed to teach your children how to be safe around strangers. Thinking about it afterward, I realized that there is this mentality – driven into our collective mindset over many years – that ALL strangers are not to be trusted; that ALL strangers… Continue reading “Stranger Safety” and “Public Solitude”
Category: society
Our Paranoid Society
This is what happens when everyone is afraid of everyone else: His mission was to photograph each of the nation’s 50 state capitol buildings and dispatch a postcard from each city, using postage stamps from a childhood collection. Each postcard would be mailed to the next state on his journey, where he would pick it… Continue reading Our Paranoid Society
Applying Old Laws to New Technology
You’ve probably heard of the RIAA and the MPAA (the Recording Industry Association of America and the Motion Picture Association of America, respectively) before. They’ve been in the news a lot lately – suing old people who don’t have a computer for sharing mp3 files on the Internet and so forth. A recent Slashdot story… Continue reading Applying Old Laws to New Technology
The Right to Read
I stumbled across this the other day – it’s a sort of story about the future, or what it might be like, if we continue to allow both large corporations and the government dictate what we do with the information we buy. I came across it because I was reading about Amazon’s new e-book reader… Continue reading The Right to Read
Taking Pictures from a Train
This is absolutely terrible: The train is a half hour west of New Haven when the conductor, having finished her original rounds, reappears. She moves down the aisle, looks, stops between our seats, faces the person taking pictures. “Sir, in the interest of national security, we do not allow pictures to be taken of or… Continue reading Taking Pictures from a Train