We are Little Sister, and we are watching us.

[kpete]

We are Little Sister, and we are watching us.

Little Sister is everyone who carries a cellphone with a digital camera that can upload pics and viddy to the intertubes. Little Sister is the “Macaca” who provided now former Senator George Allen an opportunity to destroy his political career. Little Sister is the 3 or more BART riders who viddied BART policeman Johannes Mehserle shooting Oscar Grant as Grant lay prone on the floor of the car. Little Sister is an emergent property of people interacting via the ever-faster global communications grid and all the technologies, software, and infrastructure that make, extend, and connect it.

In my opinion, Little Sister trumps Big Brother. To be a bit derisive about it, Big Brother is sooo Twentieth Century. Little Sister needs no Ministry of Love, no Ministry of Truth. Little Sister is distributed. Little Sister is every blogger, every person with a Facebook or a YouTube or a Twitter or Vodpod or Identica or whatever the lubed up social tool is the latest trend–o-ware to backdoor the Internet. Little Sister is every person who has an email account, even if that person is a homeless person who accesses his email via a computer at the Public Library.

Big Brother is top down, Little Sister is bottom up. Little Sister benefits from the flatness of the infosphere as it now stands, Big Brother must contend with it. Big Brother seeks total order; total control. Little Sister is random and nondeterministic, technology-enabled anarchy incarnate. Little Sister has the wide world under surveillance, yet defeats surveillance. Every discrete bit of Little Sister is like a subatomic particle: If you know where it is, you don’t know which way it’s going; if you know which way it’s going, you don’t know where it is. Big Brother is as often suborned by Little Sister as the other way around. I’m not saying that Big Brother is going away, but there’s a new gal in town.

Little Sister does have a significant, or shall I say signal, weakness: Her continued operation is utterly dependent on the Res Technica, the aforesaid global grid, the noose-sphere into which humankind has stuck its collective neck. Given a massive fail of any portion of the infrastructure, the blue screen of death awaits her, and we take the long fall.

more:
http://doctoromed.wordpress.com/2009/04/16/fox-reporter-bored-out-of-his-skull-at-tulsa-tea-bag-party/
via:
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2009/6/21/745170/-Little-Sister-is-watching-from-the-rooftops-of-Tehran.

[OneGrassRoot]

1. I love this. Little Sister is paying attention. Awesome! K&R n/t

[patrice]

2. It's like witnessing a special kind of birth. nt

[Psychic Consortium]

3. This force is unstoppable.

And will move us into the 21st century.

[Berry Cool]

4. But sadly, Little Sister has a counterpart, Little Brother.

Little Brother does things like taking surreptitious pictures up women's skirts and posting them on the intertoobz.

[mrbarber]

5. Well of course, since all men..

Must be sexist, misogynistic jerks.

Sexism. It's a two way street.

[Berry Cool]

6. No. I was not implying that at all.

I was speaking of a specific negative consequence of our modern-day technology. Just one.

And by pointing it out, I was by no means implying all men were guilty of it.

If you have a problem with the OP implying that the positive side of modern technology is feminine (Little Sister) while the negative side is masculine (Big Brother), take it up with the OP.

Oh, and take it up with George Orwell while you're at it (although I doubt it will do much good). He was the one who came up with "Big Brother," so he must have been a sexist against his own sex.

Now, please take away the straw man you managed to construct out of my words and your own imagination. Thank you.

ed. slightly--you guess how

[ColbertWatcher]

7. I like the idea, but you have an uphill battle to popularize the new definition ...

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=little+sister