-By Cernan Cabriesy
Despite the star power of The Circle, the movie disappoints on so many levels. The story follows Mae Holland (Emma Watson) who gets the opportunity of a lifetime for a dream job at a massive internet company called The Circle — which resembles Facebook on steroids — collecting every piece of data the world has to offer, making it available for every user. Whatever data the company can’t collect from other sources, it collects on its own by distributing millions of tiny satellite cameras to users across the globe to be placed everywhere.
The movie explores many of the ethical questions regarding personal privacy, business occultism, and the ability of major corporations to aid society by catching “bad guys” on the one hand, while destroying the lives of innocent individuals on the other.
Perhaps it explorers too many of those ethical questions at once. So many, in fact, that the movie is unsuccessful at resolving any of them. Just as Mae decides to become “transparent,” as it is called in the film, by wearing a camera all the time and allowing the company to record her every move, conversation, and action, likewise this character’s arc becomes so transparent that any less-than-astute observer will be able to figure out the climactic twist before it happens.
The only lesson we are left with at the end is that the invasion of oir privacy will continue to get worse, there is no one to stop it, and there will always be someone at the top holding the keys, so they had better be “ethical,” whatever that means.
Every character in this film is gray. There are no real villains, there are no real heroes. All of the other high-powered stars like Tom Hanks and John Boyega could have easily been replaced by unknown actors.
Worst of all is that liberal Hollywood gets lost in this spider web by apparently deciding to trivialize the most serious of ethical issues our future faces, mostly by turning privacy on its head and making it the villain. It’s one thing to take down the CEO of a company who makes everyone else’s life transparent except his own. By doing so Hollywood still gets to “Stick it to the Man.” That’s right out of their playbook. But they get completely lost in all of the other issues and problems addressed throughout the film. I am guessing this is the case because most liberals are ethically stunted to begin with.
Perhaps we will have to wait for some indie filmmaker to tackle the real issues properly before we get a good film out of these topics.
[Editor’s note: Looks like Hanks’ The Circle is doing poorly at the box office, too. Tom Hanks’ latest movie is his biggest bomb EVER, lowest opening box office in his career.]
I have been seeing more and more reports that writers, reviewers and bloggers are by and large useless where it comes to real news about the tech industry and this failed reporting on the iPhone ap Meerkat is a perfect example.
Laszlo Bock, Senior Vice President, People Operations, has publicly spoken out about the “lack of diversity” among Google employees. Despite Google’s far left-wing company culture, he is apologetic and wants users to know that there are reasons that Google isn’t “diverse” enough.
If you are a Twitter user you know without question that the social media service often becomes little else but a massive fight club with lots of name calling and foul language and a survey of the Twitter accounts of some well-known journalists and media types shows that they are just as prone to the fight club mentality as everyone else.
In an appearance on Fox News Sunday, senior Illinois Senator, Democrat Dick Durbin, expressed his doubt as to whether bloggers deserved Constitutional protection for their work online.
Yahoo, Inc. has announced that it has cleared the way to purchase the social website Tumblr for a cool $1.1 billion.
A new 
Last month, broadcast TV lifer Morely Safer of CBS’s 60 Minutes fame appeared on CSPAN and pronounced himself “appalled” by the denizens of the new media. 
On October 4, Facebook announced the milestone of reaching 
CNN 
One cannot help but feel that Politico is once again giving cover to Barack Obama’s reelection campaign with its latest love letter of an article. This time Politico is sure that Obama is king of the Internet. But it seems that at least one Internet-based area has been a disaster for Obama of late: Twitter. Not that Politico mentions any of that, of course.
And now for a little name dropping. Some of the more well-known conservatives bloggers are here this weekend chief among them Ed Morrissey famed 
The law has not caught up with cell phone cameras, Flip Cameras, compact video cameras, and the electronic age. Two stories being reported last weekend prove out how the ubiquity of video capture devices are often a gray area in the law.
Bill Clinton wants the government to “correct” what you say on the Internet, folks. Should the government listen to the former panderer-in-chief, we’ll go from Big Brother to Big Bubba on the ol’ Internet tubes.
Well, folks, this is bound to happen more and more as time rolls onward in this New Media world of ours. A blogger is in trouble with local Ohio officials who are trying to Shut him down using a badly applied campaign finance law all because he has been critical of county officials on his blog. That’s right, a county board is trying to 
The 
You know, we all love the Internet. Heck, I make a good portion of my living on Al Gore’s most famous invention so it gets a big thumbs up from me, for sure. But we have to admit that there are an awful lot of goofballs on these Internet tubes. In some ways, the whole venue isn’t quite ready from prime time, if you will.