The Many Faces of You - Claire Cain Miller
Facebook has received its share of criticism as it prods people to make more information on the site public. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder and chief executive, has said Facebook reflects social norms, which are rapidly changing as people become more comfortable sharing more information with more people.But attitudes toward sharing have not necessarily changed. Instead, people are developing new norms to manage their online lives, said Coye Cheshire, an assistant professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who studies online social intelligence.
For instance, after a party or vacation, people will often e-mail others in the group to find out if it is O.K. to post the photos on Facebook. “People begin to realize the implications of their actions, and that’s where norms get generated,” Professor Cheshire said.
The etiquette may be evolving, but the technology is moving faster than our social practices can adapt.
The position that we have — or should have — a single unitary social identity is wrong, and I have taken to calling it Zuckerberg’s Fallacy. One of the implications of the Fallacy is everything should be public. This notion of ubiquitous publicy (or publicness, as others call it) is an insidious moralistic stance, and is based on the same sweeping generalizations that dominate discussions about privacy in the political sphere.
The reality is that post industrial identity is a network of distinct identities, some of which may not gibe with each other. There is a possible conflict inherent in this multiphrenic identity (as Kenneth Gergen called it), and possible opprobrium when contacts in one context learn of the nature of another context, like the bridge club finding out about your foot fetish.
This is why we have an increased need for privacy and secrecy in a world that is becoming more public.
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