I feel pretty depressed every time I watch people flip out about the dangers of talking to strangers. Strangers helped me become who I was. Strangers taught me about a different world than what I knew in my small town. Strangers allowed me to see from a different perspective. Strangers introduced me to academia, gender theory, Ivy League colleges, the politics of war, etc. So I hate how we vilify all strangers as inherently bad. Did I meet some sketchballs on the Internet when I was a teen? DEFINITELY. They were weird; I moved on.
Danah Boyd on ChatRoulette, above.
In addition to being about control of our identity, privacy is about protecting ourselves from strangers.
To which I have a similar reaction as Danah's here:
"I’m still not sure what to say except that I feel this weighted sense of Le Sigh. The same mix of depression and exhaustion I felt this morning when I was playing peek-a-boo with a smiley child in an airport and her parents whisked her away, glaring at me as though I was the devil incarnate. I realize that many parents think that they’re doing good by their kids when they choose to limit their exposure to the randomness of the world, but it just makes me deeply deeply sad."
I still vividly remember once upon a time when I was little, when I was watching Interview With A Vampire with my parents. There was a family friend there as well. I couldn't have been more than 10 years old. As I remember, there's a part where one of the female characters is nude for some reason (If I remember correctly it's part of some gruesome performance where she's devoured by vampires).
I don't remember the exact comments, but I remember the family friend making some objection about me being there (not because of the gruesome scene, but because of the nudity), and I remember my parents making some response about exposure and reality.
And I remember it because it so deeply reflects the world I grew up in, in which exposure to the world mattered above all, for all it's grittiness and for all it's conflicting, differing, and paradoxical views that constantly change the way I think about things.
At some point I'll explain the idea of defining intelligence as "efficient cross-domain optimization," as I ran into at this weekend's NYC Future Salon. But for now, suffice to say that this exposure has made all the difference to me in the cross-domain realm, in the same sense that Danah expresses above: were it not for exposure to weird and scary strangers, it's likely she'd never be the academic she is today.
