Final Project Excerpt (Comment on blog post The Circle and Thoreau's Walden)

The need for constant surveillance is an example of how much companies want to grow and expand to gain even more information about their users. This idea can best be seen in the blog post The Circle and Thoreau’s Walden. In this blog post, the author says “Thoreau uses the word desperation to refer to the way humans continually want more success and wealth, pursuing technology for the sake of technology because we always want more, even when we don’t need it.” This can be referred to how the technology company kept adding unnecessary technologies such as TruYou and SeeChange. The purpose of these two technologies were to erase any privacy from the companies’ users and to increase how much control the company has over an individual and show how the idea of privacy for each individual has decreased. In The Circle, the Three Wise Men admit that it is better to know the most about a person, so one can “close the circle.”  In other words, if a company knows everything, then they can then control what to release to the public and what the public knows. It is detrimental if the public only gets to know what the company chooses to release because that means that the public cannot find out anything which the company doesn’t want to know. These companies and even social media can also do unknown surveillance on its users.