Sleep Dealer Presents Dark Vision of Future Social Networks

Saw a great movie last night called Sleep Dealer, a dark, distopian vision of the future where globalization reaches the ultimate level of dehumanization. People wear nodes that enable them to connect to machines and operate robots in far-away locations, but these nodes can also be used to connect directly to the internet and upload one's memories to an online memory selling service.

One of the lead characters is a "freelance writer," but instead of writing in the conventional sense she connects to this black vision of YouTube and uploads her memories, hoping to sell them to make ends meet. If people like the memories, they ask for more and pay a fee to the "writer."This got me thinking that perhaps the screen writer has a point.

Perhaps in a sense we are all sticking the internet in our veins and sharing parts of ourselves online. Social networking certainly has plenty of upside and I'm a big fan, but is there a line? We have to learn to keep at least parts of ourselves private and not provide every detail of ourselves to the world. How much you reveal is a personal decision, and certainly sharing some personal information is what humanizes us on social networks, lets people see that we are so much more than our professional selves. But if you take it too far, consider the long tail idea and how we are using the internet, Sleep Dealer presents an interesting metaphor for a dark social networking vision.