Stop doing that!

Is it a good habit to break up the habit?

As far as the internet is concerned, the answer seems to be "yes".
Every month - if not every week - new tools or new online applications emerge and constantly change the face of the online world and therefore our way to use it.


When I was about 12, I chatted for the first time on a common online platform. Only teenagers were "hanging out" - so to speak - on this website, and the vocabulary level was extremely limited... This platform was like a large common computer window, where people posted their reactions in a total anarchy.

But revolution was about to happen : MSN made an impressive breakout in our lives of early internet users. New habits were emerging. Young people started to say "lol" (laughing out loud) and "mdr" (mort de rire, in French). A whole new social etiquette was born, with its own codes and habits.

I'm only talking about the chatting applications of the web, but this pattern is almost the same in every aspect of the web. I don't think these habits are a good or a bad thing to break, I think the really important question is that we constantly need to adapt ourselves to the internet's evolutions, so that we can keep up with the rest of the world.

Your mother wasn't made of cellophane!

Transparency. Today's new religion.

Everybody knows the novel 1984, a story about a dictatorial world where everyone is constantly watched by the entity "Big brother". However, strangely enough, it seems that nobody realizes that today's world and the nightmare described by George Orwell a few decades ago, looks more and more alike!

Public cameras now seem to be everywhere. In the streets, in the subway, even in public restrooms! Anyone can learn about someone else's life with a few clicks on Google. And the scariest thing is that, at the moment, there is no valid law that prevents those kinds of privacy invasions.

If a majority of people still approve most of the measures that improve transparency in general, more and more citizens are concerned about their privacy.

In my opinion, transparency has many advantages but can lead to dangerous situations. Anyone can find a lot of informations about anyone and can use these informations against them. There is almost no way to take back the informations we did not want to spread online. Today, new companies are being created precisely to keep track of their client's reputation. They are called "reputation cleansers", their activity consists in erasing their clients' informations online.

I'm thinking these companies will make a lot of money in the next few years!

Musicians on the verge of a nervous breakdown

For most people, internet means "freedom" or "ability to speak with the people they care about anywhere in the world". But for the music industry, internet is rather a synonym of "economic downturn".

As a matter of fact, over the last ten years, musicians have witnessed a incredibly fast fall of their sales. And, as less and less albums were sold in the music stores, just as much music was - and still is - downloaded for free from the internet. If some governments are currently thinking about the different possible ways to prevent those illegal downloads, most people keep filling up their hard drive with albums of their favorite - and less favorite - bands.

If I'm saying "and less favorite", it's because these changes in the habits of those new "consumers" have also changed their listening habits. In fact, many illegal downloaders say that a lot of the music they download is so poor that they just wouldn't buy it if it were the only way they could listen to it. Some also say that when they really like an album, they still go to a store or on a legal online platform to buy it to support the artists that are actually worth it.

So who is to believe? Is the music industry right when it says that it is only the victim of a worlwide theft, or is today's music so bad that it explains alone the reason why people prefer getting most of it for free?

The artists themselves seem divided about this difficult issue. If the mainstream musicians are generally in favor of a strict legal ban of illegal downloading, some are more balanced in their analysis. For instance, some new artists became famous precisely thanks to the internet and the ability it gave them to broadcast their songs.The other main issue lies in the technical advance the hackers always have on the law.

And what about my opinion, do you ask? Well, I don't know, I'm just too into this new album I've just downloaded to answer right now...