IgniteNYC: Publicy And The Erosion Of Privacy
[These are the slides I used at IgniteNYC last night, and something like what I intended to say. In several cases I ran out of time before making the final quip! 15 seconds per slide is fast!]
William James once said, “A man coins a new word at his own peril.” Nonetheless, the rapid changes surrounding online sharing and privacy have led me to spin up ‘publicy’ to represent the shift to public as a default instead of private as the default.
No matter how open we want to be, or how much we’d like institutions to be transparent, some things must be kept private. But how much? Our social contract is changing fast.
There’s a tradition in the West of respecting personal privacy, but this has limits. It’s a felony to wear a mask in public in most US states, for example, and the Feds have the right to tap your phone, once a court agrees.
We feel we have the right to conceal what’s in our thoughts, and what goes on in our bedroom. We believe we should not have to walk through a ‘full-body’ scanner in the airport because our privates are private.
Our notions of privacy are a response to sharing physical space, and creating conventions so we can live together without causing offense and killing each other.
When we first went online, in the early days of social media, it was mostly about ‘personal publishing’ and it was more about influencing open social discourse than social connection. More about Freedom of Speech than Freedom of Association.
The more recent Web 2.0 era of social media is different: much more social, based on social networks. But the Web is not a shared space, it’s shared time, no matter how many people say it is. So much of what we mean by ‘privacy’ doesn’t hold online.
On the Web you must publish to be known. You can’t have social experience online and remain totally private. You can’t ‘see’ someone on Foursquare unless they tell you there are there.
‘Publicy’ is gaining ground over privacy because we are spending more time online is social streams. We have come to believe that this is a natural thing, and a natural right, despite all the talk that it is making us stupid.
We are affiliating with others that share our involvement in online involvement, and we value the time spent and lessons learned online more the more we are online. “I am made greater by the sum of my connections, and so are my connections,” as I say.
As just one example of how tools influence this, consider how streaming apps (like Twitter, Facebook, and Yammer) are displacing email, and how this change seems to shape what is being said and how it is interpreted.
Not only is the pace or tempo of communication different with streams, perhaps the biggest shift is that in a stream you don’t (generally) say exactly who is supposed to see something. Messages are released, not addressed.
And of course, it’s a public stream, not an inbox. A place where you hear many voices, some from unknown members of your social scene: the dark matter of social influence impinging on you.
Facial recognition and augmented reality means that people you haven’t met will know who you are walking down the street. This is a distant echo of Andy Warhol’s 15 seconds of fame: everyone will be famous for 15 meters.
Brands will be able to make you offers you can’t refuse, like gifts from a friend. That’s because we will have friended them, so they can know about us. They will be about as accurate as casual friends are when guessing what we like or don’t like.
We are zooming toward a new social contract, between each other, brands, and the platforms and apps that mediate our sociality. Facebook’s Privacygate and Google’s mislaunch of Buzz are disruptive because they break an existing contract before we have agreed to the new one.
Our brains are plastic and the postmodern shift to a radically different social setup will mean we change deeply, and our identity will morph to match. We aren’t defined in the same ways anymore.
The 20th Century notion of identity is that we are monoliths. unitary, based on a single set of attributes — like how much we make public or private: a single self dealing with a single world.
But today we are affiliating with many worlds — in Foursquare, Twitter, SuicideGirls — and we are shifting to a networked self, comprised of distinct identities matching those worlds. This is what Kenneth Gergen refers to as multiphrenic identity.
Despite the recent publicy missteps of Facebook and Google — Facebook is like watching a drunk fall down the stairs, at this point — we are moving toward a new social contract. Despite the hiccups, I remain optimistic that the era of publicy and the erosion of privacy will lead to a better world in which to play and work.
[Update:
Here’s a drawing that Heather from ImageThink.net made from my talk! Wow!
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