sashinka | observation orientated, with a twist of lime | a blog

Who Are We?

We are the google generation. We are the people who can find things out. Anything. Watch us discover where you work and what you thought about Outlook 98 in a long forgotten newsgroup. More scarily, watch us find out your "fun and pleasure" MSN ID and see what chatrooms you go to. Watch us deconstruct the headers in your email. Watch us see who you're linked to, and who you hang out with, and what you think. We don't go to a meeting without seeking the holy google first.

We are the 192.com generation. We can find out where you live, if we want to. We can find out who your neighbours are, if we pay for premium service. Watch us see if you're registered on the electoral roll. Watch us multimap.com your address and see your local park.

We are the global-is-local generation: we loved upmystreet.com, and we can find out anything on scoot.co.uk and yell.com. Give us a couple of seconds, honest.

We are the mailinglist generation: if we don't know something, we know a mailing list that does.

We are the detail generation. We used to just know something vaguely: we read it in the paper once, we saw it on the news. Now we have a separate linklog of everything that interests us, and we can find it, like, in the nanosecond it took me to type "like". We don't have good memories - there's too much to know - but we have a lot of RAM.

We are the everything-is-published generation. We know that every little email we write, or comment on a blog, or anything at all is out there in a big way, in the big cache up in the sky, and we can't get it back. We're having our open sources lives in the open, and there aren't any secrets, any more.

We are speed, we are now, we are searching, we are finding.

Of course every watcher is also a watchee: except I don't live anywhere near a park. But once my information is out there, it's o-u-t-t-h-e-r-e.

Watch us and weep. You can't hide (but then neither can I). And you can't even run, now. Unless, of course, you're on some special running mailing list.