The Media Supermarket

This was the title of a TV show on Alarabiya, which consisted of two parts: the first was a translation of the documentary, and the second was a discussion of the documentary by a panel of specialists in the field.
As a Google fan myself, I was interested in watching and getting to know more about the company and its services.
What was really interesting was thinking about the inevitable dilemma such a company will have to face, even if they had the most noble of intentions: in order to serve us better, they need to provide innovative and better products/services, and in order to be able to do that, they will need to collect more and more information about us, and keep that information stored, so they can base their developments on a sound history of searches, links, thoughts etc.
The same applies to us, the users; if we want better services and a more personalized experience, we will have to share some information about ourselves. Our privacy is the cost.
Maybe this is something that comes with becoming a celebrity.(Time magazine named me, and “You” person of the year.
So, what do we do, when faced with such a situation? Do we do our best to try and escape all the systems that try to “understand” us by following us in everything that we do?
As Seth Godin mentions in one of his posts,
“The thing is, privacy is an illusion. You think you have privacy, but the video surveillance firms and your credit card company disagree. If we’re already on camera, we might as well get some benefits from it. If we choose.”
Instead of trying to find the blind spots of the surveillance cameras and trying to avoid them, I think we should just come out and dance in front of these cameras! I don’t see any other choice. At least these cameras will know we have nothing to hide.
Saatchi & Saatchi’s CEO, Kevin Roberts expresses a similar attitude in the second point of his credo,”If it ain’t broke… Break it!”
We usually fall in the trap of trying to mend minor details in our hope to get back to the old pattern of doing things. This new attitude suggests that maybe if things started to break, they are not fit to the new situation anymore. Therefore…? Break it and go on.
Our “privacy” as we know it, is starting to break, and we might just be better off adjusting to the new system, and hopefully making good use of it.