Coming to a Street Near You.......

Following on from Taranjit's mention of 'google' - a few weeks ago I was reading a piece that was telling of their proposal to photograph every property in the country and use them like 'Google Mapping', only in more explicit detail. Any member of the public could be photographed along with the properties and would then end up on the website for the world to view. 'Google' say it's for tourism - to help people make choices about where they want to visit. I think it's a little more insidious than that and people of ill intent have got a data base of addresses worth investigating for criminal activity. With this in mind, a new breed of paranoia could be born, more security conscious and even more wary of strangers on their street.

Anyway, that was just a slight diversion from more important matters. I thought of something which may have bearing on the question of free will. If someone takes up some form of discipline, i.e. religion, uni, or even sport, they (usually) make the decision to do so of their own free will, but by doing so then relinquish a certain amount to be controlled by the constraints of the discipline they have chosen. But they still own the right of exercising their free will and changing the path they have chosen.

This leads on to the idea of Sartre and his concept of the 'being for itself'. His concept is that everything we do (or don't do) is a decision we make for ourselves and are fully responsible for both the decision and the consequences. Where the control of someone else fits into this is in the seduction of things like the media, where their rhetoric is designed to draw you in and buy into their ideas.

I have also put together the basic template for a PowerPoint. I'll print off the 'story so far' and bring it with me on Thursday so that we can scribble all over it. By that I mean that we can write on each slide what we want on the end product, so that over the weekend I can put it all on the computer and bring it in on Monday for any final adjustments. We also need to finalise the actual talk by doing a script of sorts and then each can do cue cards to use on the day.