Jimmy Don,
I really like this post about privacy and online community.
I think these are really deep issues…that kind of appear to be just another set of technology adjustments….whereas privacy gets to the heart of “who we are”.
In online environments, who we are is a set of data in a social profile, plus a number of relations to other data sets, such as “online friends” “avatars” predilections for media artifacts…and what sites we are “members” of.
That’s a different way of knowing thyself in relation to the rest of reality…than what we had before. It’s so highly mediated, that its a new thing.
Privacy in our previous incarnation meant certain things that are different from what that concept means in the online incarnation. So much of what we are doing online is a creation of a certain kind using different kinds of information. The rules and tools and reasons that make that new thing “work” are different than what works in our “other” or “previous” incarnations.
So there are two things that are really tricky for our age, our time, right now.
One, is learning what a self is in this new online form…and all that goes along with muddling through to some awareness of how that “works”….
And Two….figuring out the appropriate relationship between our previous self’s needs for privacy, and our new needs for privacy. The two may well not be that compatible…
I tend to trust Julia’s leadership in the online privacy thing, where she is out there in so many respects…online…but she is a bit different about her non online person…and has some ideas about how the two work together.
I don’t really understand it myself, but I’ve been a risk taker with changing concepts of self…and I do believe somewhat in the revealed self being the our best chance to reach our fullest human potentials. I tend to fall on the side of self revelation being the means by which relationship grows…and also tend to think that’s the best part of our destiny.
But of course, the world is also a dangerous place, and security, and the ability to be safe are important parts of creativity and the willingness to be able to take chances and “be oneself” in the face of authoritarianism and convention.
Are you feeling lucky punk?
The thing is I don’t think we can reach the potentials of the self online without letting go of some privacy concerns…but that’s not to say I fully envision how we can do that and still have the needed levels of security>>> This kind of reminds me of the sixties counterculture, where it wasn’t sometimes “safe” to be “weird”, but people did it anyway.
The culture as a whole probably benefited from some people’s willingness to test the limits of change, though in individual cases, some lives were destroyed in the process.
In other words, if we dont’ test the limits of how much freedom in the realm of personal revelation online we can manage…we’ll never know how far we can go. But some people are going to get hurt by being the one’s who set the limits for us by exceeding what’s safe and crashing.
In this cohort, I think it’s been a plus to not be afraid and be hanging out frankly and honestly…some of that has to exist to have community…but I’m also not sure of what is the “safe” limit for self revelation either…maybe it’s a choice one can only have one or the other but not both?
John
