The Experience Economy: Work Is Theater & Every Business a Stage by Gilmore and Pine has quickly become one of my favorite books, alongside another very popular book, The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferris. Both books feature what I believe to be some of the more unique, and applicable, thinking about the world in the new millennium that we find ourselves now a part of in everyday life. Let me describe to you, briefly, why:

Microsoft apparently doesn't like to listen and then dialog with their most sophisticated users when it comes to security issues, to name just one way they are failing as a business in the Information Age. A security vulnerability in SQL Server, Microsoft's premier database management application which competes with products like Oracle, MySQL, and others was discovered and reported in the linked article.  In a nutshell, this security vulnerability allows a user with administrative priveledges to SQL Server to access other user's passwords, but not without some "hacking" to do so.  In any case, Microsoft has refused to fix the problem because they don't care about their users.

I asked the question, "How much personal information should we allow online?" in a previous post titled, Online Personal Information - How Much Is Too Much?. This question has been weighing heavily on my mind this entire week, so I have decided to expand on some of the ideas that I touched on in that previous post, in this article. I will explore the implications of online privacy, transparency, redundancy, accountability, and risks in this article. You will see that there are benefits to walking a tight line of balance between complete online transparency, and the far more prevalant ultra-privacy that our current American society expects in everyday life.