Why Facebook and Telepathy Don't Mix

[C C]

http://www.informationweek.com/it-life/w...SS_IWK_EDT

EXCERPT: Mark Zuckerberg said in a Facebook chat this week that he believed the future of communication was telepathy. Presumably, he also meant that was the future of Facebook. No more status updates. No more walls. No more messenger. Not even pokes. Just broadcast your thoughts. Sounds cool, but in practice, what would that be like? It sounds like a potential nightmare to me. [...] A constant barrage of thoughts. It would be like self-imposed ADHD. Heck, sometimes that is what it already feels like when you read Facebook....

[Magical Realist]

The problem with telepathy is deciding at what point a thought in your mind becomes your own thought and not someone else's. Unless there is some intrusive quality to someone else's thoughts, like a rude pop-up on your computer screen. Then you can imagine the hell of just reading a computer screen all day long cluttered with continuous pop-ups of other people's thoughts! Thank goodness for privacy of thought, where only our "own" thoughts rise up to us from the infinitely deep well of creative inspiration.

[stryder]

The sort of Telepathy that Zuckerberg is likely referring to is an artificially constructed one. Where by a person who wants to use "telepathy" would require probably having a contract with a service that converts thought to radiowaves and back again. This could either be done with something like a headset or using a technology. It could just go the whole hog and envelope the world where waveforms through a persons skull (bone reverberation technology) or a more sophisticated technique that can read directly from thought.

In any sense, it's not that a person would have the choice or freedom to decide who they wanted to communicate without having some form of medium of communication (A corporation viewing our every thought, listening for when we want to communicate and/or stealing when we aren't looking.)

I've known about the reality for years due to my own personal experience. I try to explain it on occasion however it's very messy to explain, mostly because the people responsible for doing it don't want me identifying who they are or how long they have been operating their equipment. (Let's just say this started before 9/11 and I still have reservations as to whether 9/11 would have ever occurred if they hadn't started developing the technology)