What’s Old Is What’s New: Privacy in the Age of Social Media

We all know and hear regularly about the issues of online privacy. There are those who claim that the amount we share online marks the beginning of techno-fascism. There are those on the other side who point out that this is just the new world order, and the privacy is an outmoded concept. Both are true, both are overblown.

But I want to suggest this new “living in public” is not new. Rather, it’s a return to older ways of life.Historically,  privacy has been more the exception than the rule. Those who lived in large cities might have had some anonymity, but for the most part, everyone in the smaller communities knew everyone else, and all of their business. A drinking problem? The whole village knew about it. Whatever you had done as a young man would follow you all the days of your life, because you were still dealing with same people 40 years on.

Now, I’m not saying this is ideal or the way it should be: simply that is not new. During the modern era we’ve grown accustomed to privacy, come to count on it. We’ve even begun to regard it as a right. But as we share more and more of our lives via twitter and facebook, that privacy is going away, and we’re beginning to live in an electronic village. All that remains is to create the reputations that we will carry around forever.

Facebook and AOL: The More Things Change. . .

Going back 10 or 15 years, I remember all the talk about how AOL (America Online) was dead. How a proprietary version of the Internet, sanitized, simply was no longer necessary, now that the basic Internet tools were so easy to use, and only getting more so. The Internet had become accessbile to the general user. We could easily access discussion boards, email and graphical content over easy to use Internet tools. AOL seemed like the bunny slope of the Internet. Sure there was some otherwise unavailable content and games, but in order to use it it felt as though one had to give up the infinite wonder of the Internet. It was a proprietary network which made it easy to access content and connect with friends (and play games!), but we could do all that over the Internet itself. [For the sake of full disclosure, I should say I never had an AOL account].

Now, more than a decade later, it’s been many years since we’ve had discussions of what to do with AOL CDs. We look at the technology landscape, and AOL seems a cautionary tale, a dinosaur from the early days of dot-com.

Now, it’s all about facebook. You know, that proprietary network which makes it easy to connect with friends, access content and play games. Of course it’s also got messaging–which looks a lot like a proprietary email system–instant messaging and discussion boards. We’ve recreated AOL (though it doesn’t inform us chipperly “You’ve Got Mail”). How did that happen?

The Internet got too big. Too many tools. Email, chat, microblogging, blogging, gaming, discussion boards. We wanted to be able to have all of our friends in a single interface, and to share things with each other. And we wanted it to be easy, all inside the browser.

There are certainly those who dislike facebook–for many of the same reasons we eschewed AOL. But on the whole, we love our facebook (and I, as much as anyone, am an afficianado of facebook). And while I can suggest reasons for the recreation of the proprietary Internet experience, I’m not sure I can really make sense of it.

AOL (and compuserve, etc.) are dead. Long live facebook.

Blogging About Social Media and Technology: I’m an “Expert”

It is with great hesitation that I’m beginning to blog about social media and technology. It is not my field of primary expertise, and the there are already far too many “experts” out there. But after weeks of having four or five social-media themed posts that I wasn’t writing for my other blog because they were too far off my almost non-existent topic, it seemed like it was time to break down and create a blog dedicated to Social Media, Technology and Society.

So I begin, with a bit of a tongue in cheek look at the social media expert (myself included).

The interior dialogue monologue of the social media consultant:

When I got up this morning [we'll call it morning even if it was almost 11AM] I knew it was going to be a great day because that’s what I tweeted. And then I read my own tweet on TweetDeck, and if you see it on Twitter, it has to be true.

So I contacted one of my clients (and by client I mean this guy I know who needs help with facebook–money changing hands is so irrelevant in the SocialMedia world), and we IMed for a good 45 minutes. Then  I updated my linked-in page to reflect the work I did for the client this morning: “Prepared social media response push for experimental agriculture system.” It means I told him how to request gifts in farmville.

This evening I have a big networking event. I’m really looking forward to seeing people, and having people see me be too busy with my iPhone to talk with them. I’m sure I’ll make some great contacts. I have stickers to hand out, but they’re special: they’re blank. It symbolizes how we create our own media. That way, whenever someone sees a blank page, they’ll think of me. Brilliant!

Well, I better get going. I have to polish my fonts or something.

And with that, I’ll be going, but I’ll have more real content in the future.