The internet is one of humanities greatest achievements. it has liberated communication across the world in the from of email, chat, IM, social networking, streaming video and audio and more. the internet has become an important tool for every day folks as well as for governments and huge corporations and organisation. We can no longer envisage life without internet (though some of us would like to hit the kill switch at some point). the internet is one of the modern worlds most versatile and all encompassing inventions.
one of the good, or bad (the jury is still out), aspects of the internet is that it affords us to create a virtual extension of the various personae that we usually keep locked up deep in the back of our minds. personae that we are too shy to share in the real world, or personae that are deemed unacceptable in the real world (at least those of us who are sensible in the real world). the internet provides the grounds of creating personae that are detached from our real world realities and emotional and social obstacle. The internet is truly a wonderful thing (at least for most of us it is).
the internet has grown phenomenally over the years. growth is good as it provides improvements and enhances what is already there. but like a human being coming in to young adulthood in all the fanfare of the chaos of emotions and raging hormones, the aging of the internet presents similar growing pain problems. for one thing, think of the tremendous amount of information that we have to keep up with because of it. Any one person currently using the internet is bombarded with a gargantuan amount of information from news sites, to social sites and a plethora of other sources. that is a bad thing but I believe that one day the clutter will be easier to wade through (or it could go the opposite way and we get the equivalent of land fills.. a virtual one)
then there are the many sites and many places where you can subscribe to, sign up to, join, become a member of, and so on. an ordinary internet user would have an email account (or accounts), a news site accounts, multiple store accounts, Facebook account, twitter account, linked in account, and accounts at various sites that we may or may not still be frequenting (forums, blogs, game sites, school accounts, etc).
It is good, in my opinion that we have the freedom to have all these accounts, but honestly.... the process of keeping up with all these accounts is cumbersome at best. we have to remember every username, every password, individual settings for privacy that keep getting updated for each account, preferences, the list is endless... it is difficult trying to keep up with all of these accounts and subscriptions. if we change our email address, or if we drop an address that we no longer use, we have to change it at every one of those sites individually. we also end up leaving a large foot print for all the sites that we signed up for once and never visited again.
lets say i have an account at zookies.com that i have not used in ages. i don't remember the password and the email i used to create the account is no longer valid. what am i supposed to do? create a new account and allow my footprint to grow even more in an uncontrolled fashion? i think not.
our online life is spreed out across the endless horizons of the internet we need a method of centrally controlling all of it. sure there are initiatives like OnpenID and MSN Passport (does that still exist?) and other sites that allow you to log in to sister sites without creating a new account, or you can log in using your Facebook credentials... but non of it is a set standard that works across the board. what I, a dyslexic adult, need is a central place to control ALL of my accounts and ALL settings of my accounts from one single interface. even if we deiced to use different handles, emails and information for each of these accounts. and we should be given the option to make some of our accounts untraceable to our main personality, or at least allow them to exist independently of other accounts and personal online persons but still be able to manage them centrally. that would be nice and it would go a long way to helping us reduce the strain caused by information overload and allow us to organize our internet life more efficiently.
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