I had a little trouble finding an article to relate to the reading this week but luckily after watching a few videos, TED talks saved the day 🙂

The video in the link below reminds me of the article “Does the Whatever Speak?” The article mentions the irony of having people in China mine for coins in games to sell them online as they waste their time to make little money in return and how Americans waste their time adding to social networking sites and providing data big companies can capture and use for marketing purposes or whatever…. and how we do this for free and consider it leisure instead of work. The article says “each and every day, anyone plugged into a network is performing hour after hour of unpaid micro labor.”  I knew my information was being observed and directed back to me in terms of what I see advertised on Facebook, Amazon, and Google, but I never really thought of it as unpaid labor. Sometimes it does feel like that. It’s not always fun being online and sometimes it just seems like something you have to maintain and upkeep…. like a garden.

Anyway, we are all “tagging, clicking, uploading, and contributing, posting and commenting” and I wanted to see more examples of how this information is taken by bigger companies who seem benefit so much from our desire to be social and stay connected. THEN… I found this TED Talk about phone companies in Europe. In 2006, the EU commission created a Data Retension Directive where each phone and internet service company was asked to store a wide range of information on it’s users, including who you speak to and where you are, with the information to be held for 6 months to 2 years.

This guy demanded to get his information which ended up in a lawsuit and he finally got his info and made a data visualization.

It all has a very big Big Brother feel… it’s creepy but the guy argues that all hope is not lost we just have to fight very hard for self determination.