Do Social Networks Bring the End of Privacy?
So asks Scientific American. But first, a little story, which I can tell knowing you will only connect it to my first name and my blog, not my flesh and soul. I used to be bullied. A lot. Systematically. For years. What happens then is two things: you get paranoid. Every bat of an eye, every word, every whisper, every body movement, you start suspecting they’re laughing behind your back any chance they get and everything that could conceivably be a rap on you becomes one in your mind. Second, you get shit-scared of taking a stand, attracting attention, doing anything out of the ordinary, for fear that it will attract negative attention. Being genuine about what you think and feel leaves you vulnerable, so you become adept at not being it.
It does not wear off when the bullying ends. It lasts for a long time. Social anxiety is a bitch and anyone telling you to just get over yourself has probably not experienced it. Not in a systematic, chronic way. So, with that in mind, the story of the Star Wars kid is really fucking sad. Consider, also, that girl who sang the song at the Olympics Opening Ceremony who wasn’t cute enough to actually stand there. Jon Stewart, in his “Beijing Controversies” recap, said something like, “You thought your middle school years were hard? Imagine if your government got together and decided you weren’t cute.” Before proceeding to pretend she was the ugliest creature he’d ever seen. Luckily, she’s too young to understand it all now. I hope the experience doesn’t affect her later. Things like that on a smaller scale can absolutely destroy a child’s confidence, and I can’t even imagine how the full impact of global attention would do.
So, tying in with the article: with everyone carelessly documenting their lives online, it’s so much easier to become that laughing stock, for your weak moments (which we all have) to haunt you for the rest of the decade or even your entire life. And for every large case, there’s a hundred small cases.
I’ve previously written about the superpower of being able to make mistakes in a world where anything you say and do can and will be recorded, and can and will be brought up far in time and space from the event in question. This is a fine quote from the Scientific American article:
People want to have the option of “starting over,” of reinventing themselves throughout their lives. As American philosopher John Dewey once said, a person is not “something complete, perfect, [or] finished,” but is “something moving, changing, discrete, and above all initiating instead of final.” In the past, episodes of youthful experimentation and foolishness were eventually forgotten, giving us an opportunity to start anew, to change and to grow. But with so much information online, it is harder to make these moments forgettable. People must now live with the digital baggage of their pasts.
The article speculates about laws enforcing privacy, but I think that’s mostly a dead end. If you put it online for all to see, it’s online for all to see, you can’t come crying to the court every time someone takes advantage of it. It’s mostly a matter of personal discipline. If you treasure the ability to have some measure of control over what people know about you, and how you appear — let’s not fool ourselves, whether we like it or not reputation has a lot to do with how well we make it in life — you need to take control. I’m a little old-fashioned that way. I don’t use Twitter, Myspace, Facebook, or the like. I don’t blog under my full name (though if you email me and I reply, it’s attached to the email). I don’t share all my life and I don’t make it easy to connect everything I’ve ever done online to my person by linking it all up neatly for anyone to follow the trail. When I use social websites, I remain pseudonymous.
Some will tell you there’s something wrong with not using your full name on everything you do. It’s cowardly, it’s unethical, if you aren’t willing to have it attached to your name and picture forever, you can’t really be passionate and serious about it. What a load of bullshit. There are exactly two kinds of justified indignation when it comes to anonymity on the web: when you’re acting like an ass in a way you wouldn’t do under your full name, and when you’re saying stuff that needs the credentials of a real person behind them.
If I know you’re a person who has access to the kind of information you claim to provide, and I know you’ve told the truth in the past, I’m inclined to believe you, but if you’re an anonymous commenter who I have no reason to believe would have access to and understanding of the information you claim to provide, and who has no record of previous truth-telling, I will probably not only not believe you, but be actively annoyed. And needless to say, if you’re acting a troll, I’m going to be annoyed too.
Outside these special circumstances, there is nothing wrong with pseudonymity. You can be accountable with a pseudonym as with a real name, and besides, the belief that you need to risk your reputation on your every opinion for it to count is crap anyway.
Back to the end of privacy: no, this isn’t the end of privacy. But people are irrational and impulsive and in need of a proper understanding of just what putting all this information out there entails. This is a problem every one of us can solve for ourselves. Either just don’t post all those updates and blog posts and comments and videos and pictures and whatnot, or:
- Don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Applied to the web, that means don’t put out all information under the same name, especially not your full name, and don’t make it easy for just anyone to find it by helpfully providing links to every profile on every social website you ever got.
- Just don’t share so much damn information. Chances are we don’t care about it now and we’ll make you regret posting it in a few months or years. At least consider that before publishing.
Sadly, people don’t just stop and think. They act. I do, too. I will probably break my own rules in some weak moment or other.
The dangers that can hurt a child or teenager (or adult) with a computer and an internet connection for life isn’t porn, violence, drugs advocacy, the allure of terrorism or whatever the hell parents and pundits worry about. It’s careless sharing of information that can fuck you up good for years or decades to come. If I ever sit down with a child to do a moral talk about the internet, it’s not going to be about violence or sex or terrorism — I don’t give a shit if a child sees those — but about how you need to consider carefully anything and everything about yourself you expose online. It’s not paranoia if your suspicions aren’t “baseless or excessive”, as dictionary.com puts it.
