status messages

So this is the newest craze going around on the internet... Updating your status message every 5 min or so... I have a friend who shall remain unnamed, his google status just switched to "Shower"... Now the first thing that popped in my head was - 'seriously, do I really need to know about this'... but then I started to think, and the next thought that came was maybe this is such a momentous event in this young mans life that it deserved mention, something akin to the birth of your first child maybe?

Of course this post is not to abuse my friend, but its to question this desire that everyone seems to have of putting their every move out on the intertoob... Dont get me wrong my status changes too but its more like a seasonal change, and honestly who really cares what you are doing every second of the day, if you do then I suggest it might be time to tie the knot...

Just a few days back I read how some prof or lawyer in UK came to the conclusion that the new gen, specifically ppl in the US, are putting so much of themselves on the internet that we might be losing our right to privacy. And this is a scary thought, what someone else does on their free time does not concern me. But when enough people do it for a long enough time to redefine something so fundamental as the privacy one is entitled to, then the issue begs a longer look at... We have also had two ppl who run some of the largest online corps come out against an individuals privacy and thats even more scary because it has implications on how the law interprets things.

Does our desire to put out information about us, automatically mean that we do not deserve to have privacy in our lives. The problem with making or interpreting laws is that it has to be general, so what I may think is completely private might be for someone else their front page news.

Question to be asked is how will twittering and status updates change something so fundamental as our right to privacy? I do not imagine people will stop updating their status messages, but maybe it might be time to rethink just how much of ourselves are we putting out there. And really the people who really want to know have other ways of finding out, and the ones who dont dont.