Remember when diaries were secret?

Ah, those little stamped metal keys that were supposed to keep your sister's diary safe from prying eyes (a screwdriver worked as well. Sorry, sis!). Today, that diary has become a MySpace page and the secret crush is the guy draped over the keg on her Facebook gallery.

Something big changed over the past decade as a long trend of diminished privacy suddenly flipped to radical transparency. I suspect that most people who put their innermost thoughts online don't really expect them to be read by anyone other than their friends (a strategy known as "security through obscurity"), and sometimes not even them. Still, Michael Kinsley has an amusing take on the new era of living in public:

"But anonymity does not actually seem to interest many of the Web's most devoted users. They are the ones who start their own sites, or sign up for MySpace, or submit videos to YouTube. Quite the opposite: The most successful Web sites seem to be those where people can abandon anonymity and use the Internet to stake their claims as unique individuals. Here is a list of my friends. Here are all the CDs in my collection. Here is a picture of my dog. On the Internet, not only does everybody know that you're a dog. Everybody knows what kind of dog, how old, your taste in collars, your favorite dog food recipe, and so on."

Comments

[cstar]

And few days ago I posted on my very serious geek blog that my cat was depressed :)

[Eric]

Time and again I'm amazed at the prescience of David Brin's "The Transparent Society". He saw coming in 1998 what's really only being realized today. And most people are more than willing to go along with it.

The other thing that comes to mind is that celebrities have lived in the public eye for decades, and people have always wanted to live that kind of life. The web lets us be our own paparazzi.

[Narendra]

Chris,

The current generation gap is heavily informed by perceptions of personal privacy and it will have a profound rippling effect for many years to come. The root causes are certainly worth exploring. Is it a media/entertainment driven phenomenon driven by reality shows? Or is it simply adjusting to a new lifestyle where technology in the form of cameras are ubiquitous and privacy simply isn't practical? Is transpacency ultimately liberating our youth or will we see an eventual backlash?

[tim]

The startling thing is that Kinsley doesn't seem to be aware of the immense solipsism present in his own field. Look at opinion journalism-- it's practitioners expect to be paid and taken seriously for their ruminations on current happenings.

[igoldc]

sounds not bad!

[Big Swinging]

Whoa, great headline.

[ben]

I think it's great. It goes along with what you've said in previous posts about the "economics of abundance" - instead of being miserly with who they are, people are pasting it up lavishly, showing their real selves, their ideal selves, getting it out there and being messy. It's an expansion. But I don't think that scarcity has disappeared from the equation, as you suggest. It's just in a different place. With YouTube, for example, where you find abundance economics at work, instead of the traditional scarcity of supply (actual entertainment and the previously expensive means of making it), there's a scarcity that YouTube does actually rely on. It's there being no other YouTube. It'll be interesting to see where YouTube hovers just one or two years from now. And in the case of Radical Transparency, the scarcity that will be revealed is what's lacking in each of us. More and more people are made incrementally more 'worthless' as the internet fills up with cheap answers to most of our questions and desires. And the response to this is already visible in Gen Y (speaking from my perspective mired firmly in Generation X). Supposedly, if what the mktrs tell us is true, Gen Y values actual risk over big talk. You know -- good stories to go on those MySpace pages. Things that really happened. As opposed to the victory in Gen X coming from how you TOLD the story, ie, how much irony could be effectively deployed, what we have is the romance of risk (to quote a book title). Who knows. But if risk is elevated to a top value, we could just be in for a whole nother fluorishing of a macho, paternalistic pissing contest kind of era. woo hoo. but not to be negative. there are plenty of other potential and realistic outcomes. right?

[ben]

oh and by the way, narendra: B) and A). Well put!

[Tim]

Read: The Attention Economy. Wired, some 1997 issue.

First issue I read. I was 14, and dazzled. It fascinated me. It was my first reading of Wired, and I was hooked.

And it actually ended up making more sense than I'd like to have realized... although I'm not surprised.

What needs to be done is not stand back and say, 'God, people are so self-centered," but say, "Look, this isn't some new fleeting trend... it's just a magnification of man's need to feel he constantly must prove/impress others somehow."

Whether that's through rants, art, or claiming to "pawn" an idea, it's nothing new. The media is new, not the fundamental content.

Alexander Pope didn't write couplets in the 16th century to advance intellectual thought. He did it so he'd be quoted among the greatest long after his death.

Unfortunately, people need to realize what poets and philosophers tend to agonize over again and again in lonely dark corners of their room as a sort of coming of age as writers: you're probably not as cool as you think you are.

If people could realize that, they'd be far more likely to keep their trivial lives to themselves. The phrase "No one cares" is probably the greatest comfort this society could bestow to the Oprah set.

[David]

Someone wrote a post on his blog titled "Don't write a CV, write a Blog" (sorry can't find back where i read this). He claimed that what is blogged is much more relevant, because it's dynamic, interactive. What's more relevant putting on your CV 'I play piano' or having ablog where every two weeks you post recordings of what you play, you write about your favorite music etc... The blog puts more meat around the bone.
But of course, as in american police TV series ; 'everything you say can, and will, be used against you.... . You have the right to remain silent'. I'm especially thinking of non-democratic countries, or countries with a short history of democracy.
Will my posts in support of a free Tibet be a problem when I'll order my tickets for the Pekin Olympics ?
Will my posts on the Israël-Lebanese war be a problem to go windsurfing in Egypt ?
....
On the long term I think it will be better to have a blog than not to have. It will be kind of suspicious to not blog (do you have nothing to share ? only things to hide ?)

[Leo]

Don't touch Tibet, please!