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October 24, 2003social musingdanah boyd has written an interesting UbiComp "intimate computing" workshop paper on some of the social phenomena and implications surrounding friendster. While reading it, it occurred to me that the true threat to privacy posed by an unchecked networked society and ubiquitous computing may not be the politico-economic threat of an Orwellian "Big Brother", but a cultural-spiritual death that comes from complete social exposure. If any move you make can be visible to the world, the resulting self-censorship due to purely social factors could be stifling, even in the absence of any threat to liberty or economic livelihood. What if my friends, my mom, my ex-lover, or any gorgeous, fascinating woman I'd like to get to know better might have access to any particular activity I'm undertaking? At this point many people might cite sci-fi author David Brin's The Transparent Society, in which privacy is eradicated, but the equalized erosion of privacy across all strata of society ensures liberty. In such a situation would social norms erode, allowing socio-cultural liberty to emerge? Or would full personal exposure homogenize thinking and action, pushing towards a hive mind? I don't know... I'm just a socially-interested computer scientist in the continual process of overcoming my crass ignorance, but of the two options above I suspect the latter is the more likely. Scarily, it also seems to me that it's one or the other extreme, with little room for compromise. Notice that the physical world has wonderful things such as caves, secluded forests, and walls, floors, and ceilings, all of which provide not just physical, but social security. As such, I suspect that truly successful networked-living requires hiding spots, secret practices, control over information disclosure, and varied levels of anonymity. It is this type of control that makes true intimacy possible. So bravo to all you socio-technical scientists out there trying to figure these things out. At some point, I may get out of my armchair and join you. Posted by jheer at October 24, 2003 07:18 PMComments
On first glance, I haven't read all the links through yet: Self-censorship is the other side of the freedom people have online to create their own personae. Lots of people (myself included) participate in several blogs and forums like friendster... different people read my different blogs and I post different content and write with a different tone in them. I guess you could see it as self-censorship, but I just see it as putting out different aspects of my personality where they are each relevent. People do this in real life too I suppose, but you can compartmentalize your multiple personalities quite neatly online if you want to. I haven't tried this in movable type, so i don't know if you can do it, but xanga lets you assign your posts "protected" status so you know you're not exposing yourself to the whole world. That way you can write with different levels of openness and give out different levels of access, sort of like what we do in real life. So I think a lot of online services are addressing social security (no, not the retirement thing, you know what I mean) because customers still want it. But people are going to have to learn how to use it. Lots of people get burned because they're not careful what they post to their blogs. Complete self-censorship will not, I think, become necessary... but we will learn how to take care, and self-censor selectively. I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. Posted by: metamanda at October 27, 2003 02:33 PMI agree completely. What was getting under my skin is the thought of a future where technology has been mis-designed to the point where controlling third-party access to your actions is occluded or difficult, or worse, not possible through available interfaces. The recourse is then an overly constrictive, self-denying form of self-censorship. Unlikely, perhaps, but worth strenuously preventing. One has control over one's own blog, but how does one exercise control over a distributed, pervasive network of cameras, sensors, recorded comments, etc? The solutions are both social and technical, and I'm fortunate to be surrounded by a number of colleagues at Berkeley who are working hard to tease apart the fundamental issues and apply them to design. Some of my favorite projects/papers by these folks aren't published yet, but I'll blog about them once they are! Posted by: heerforce at October 27, 2003 08:19 PMTrackback Pings
intimate computing
Excerpt: another typically good entry from heerforce's excellent blog: > blog >> social musing (heerforceone)" href="http://jheer.org/blog/archives/000120.html">jeffrey heer >> blog >> social musing (heerforceone) I just printed up the workshop proceedings that... Weblog: Metamanda's Weblog Tracked: October 27, 2003 04:39 PM Trackback URL
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