Neighbors

These two aren't always in the pasture just above our house so we're always unequipped with carrots when we walk past. They come to the fence anyway. The cattle are out on the hill above the new subdivision. The houses in the picture are among the last to be built. They've been working on them for three years, which may have been deliberate since we've gotten used to them despite the fact that we swore we never would.

I spent much of the day listening with fascination to the testimony of Mark Zuckerberg before a US Congressional committee regarding Facebook's use of data and what they are doing to protect it.

I was left with some definite impressions. The Senators had done their homework, but still don't quite 'get' the way modern social media works. Zuckerberg was well prepared, polite, cooperative and didn't deviate much from script. The only time he forgot to begin his response with, 'Senator' was when he was asked if he would respond if he was asked in the course of this very publicly broadcast hearing what hotel he was staying in in Washington DC. There was a definite long pause before he replied, 'No'. No Facebook emoji could convey the tone of voice in which this one word was uttered, but I think it was safe to say that the Senator may have scored a 'gotcha'. Or perhaps Zuckerberg in answering the question as he chose was exercising his right to control content....

My own feeling on the subject of technology and social media is that the pace of development got ahead of anyone's ability to predict where it would lead,  how it would be used and how (or if) to control it. A company in Cambridge, England mining data from 87,000 American Facebook pages and passing the results along to a company in Russia so that they could use them to meddle in the results of American elections by placing 'fake news' on Facebook that turned an already divided populace into sworn enemies? Really? You couldn't make it up, much less predict that it would in fact happen....

I have always been of the opinion that any word or 'data' I typed into my computer, no matter what the platform, would immediately be public knowledge. It's what would actually be done with it that was beyond my ability to predict.

Perhaps I'm just out of my depth, out of step or just plain naive. It's interesting that there hasn't been this kind of media coverage of Trump's antics,  gun control, school massacres or black lives matter, yet I think there's an interface with social media that we might just be beginning to comprehend....