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Showing posts from May 4, 2014

The flagpole of entitlements and obligations

Since the last few years, I've been interested in how the web is affecting our lives and changing the way we think. While trying to understand this, I came across the question of how our sense of "entitlement" and "obligation" affect the way we think. The reason I came across this dilemma itself is a different question. It had to do with the wide disparities I observed in the emphasis placed on different aspects of online privacy and security, by different people. Nevertheless, this post is not about online privacy and security, but on our sense of entitlement and obligation. Here is a theory that I've developed: The Flagpole Model Imagine that inside each of us is a tall flagpole. A flagpole has some element of it over the ground and some element of it buried underground. The part of the flagpole that is overground is our sense of entitlement . It is what we think the external world owes us. The part of the flagpole that is underground is our s