Many years ago, when I was young, we had a healthy distrust of the 'establishment' and didn't hang around with many people we associated with it - that included school staff (except for a few obviouly 'cool' teachers) and even our parents. Signing your name to private thoughts (unless it was with spray paint) was considered stupid! We passed paper notes in class and ate them if caught. Our creative writers wrote real letters to countercultural media in hope they might publish it and if they did we showed the actual papers of fliers to our friends in person (you could get laid for that... :).
Even rumors of 'monitoring' would spread quickly (even without public 'posts' - you tell 2 friends and they tell 2 friends and so on and so on, resulting in the immediate 'shunning' of such media. We were even careful about what we said on the wired-to-the-wall phone - Mom might be on the extension.
The people who SHOULD worry about this 'new service' today are the social media companies. I suspect it won't be long before it becomes popular to 'go dark' again among some student populations and either ditch social media completely or post only sham 'sanitized' posts to keep the monitors busy. If all those 'darn kids' decide (after sales people, Govt, NSA, CIA, and now their schools start spying on them) to abandon social media some of these highly prized cash cow companies might achieve their true valuations with the 16-30 year old demographic gone F2F and no longer there to read their ads... Duh!
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Those Darn Kids
Many years ago, when I was young, we had a healthy distrust of the 'establishment' and didn't hang around with many people we associated with it - that included school staff (except for a few obviouly 'cool' teachers) and even our parents. Signing your name to private thoughts (unless it was with spray paint) was considered stupid! We passed paper notes in class and ate them if caught. Our creative writers wrote real letters to countercultural media in hope they might publish it and if they did we showed the actual papers of fliers to our friends in person (you could get laid for that... :).
Even rumors of 'monitoring' would spread quickly (even without public 'posts' - you tell 2 friends and they tell 2 friends and so on and so on, resulting in the immediate 'shunning' of such media. We were even careful about what we said on the wired-to-the-wall phone - Mom might be on the extension.
The people who SHOULD worry about this 'new service' today are the social media companies. I suspect it won't be long before it becomes popular to 'go dark' again among some student populations and either ditch social media completely or post only sham 'sanitized' posts to keep the monitors busy. If all those 'darn kids' decide (after sales people, Govt, NSA, CIA, and now their schools start spying on them) to abandon social media some of these highly prized cash cow companies might achieve their true valuations with the 16-30 year old demographic gone F2F and no longer there to read their ads... Duh!