How To Break Anything

And what about privacy?
Is this another nail in the coffin of the very concept of privacy? In the future will we really share everything? Ultimately people will be the ones to decide what they want to share and with whom. But now it will be not only what happens on Facebook.com, but everything happening outside it too.

The above from We Are Social's longer synopsis of Facebook Open Graph.

What I'm interested in is the statement above on privacy. Particularly re: 'deciding.'

It illuminates the question: what is it exactly that you're 'deciding' upon when you "decide what to share and with whom"?

Rather, I should ask: what are the conditions within which you are deciding?

I'd imagine you'd be making a completely different decision between choosing to what to share within two different environments:

1) no one shares anything about themselves online (10 years pre-facebook)
2) everyone shares everything about themselves online (10 years post-facebook)

And ultimately that has little to do with the 'decision' itself, and much more to do with the conditions within which the decision is made.

Just something to consider as you decide ('decide'?) how this all makes you feel about 'privacy.'

"As a public experiment, artist Julia Burns (alias: 'rose_burns') decided to blog on twitter in full view of the lunchtime crowd in Martin Place, Sydney, for one hour.

She sat on her living room couch, wearing ugg boots and a comfy sweater, next to her heater, favourite cup, and a box of chocolate mints as she posted tweets about her life in front of the Channel 7 building.

Burns is interested in the concepts of public access to the private sphere and the changing nature of privacy.

Do 'followers' read with the same zest in the real world as they do in cyberspace?

What is it like to follow a stranger's blog entries, while standing in front of them?

Why do individuals increasingly publicize their private lives?

Recognising the immense complexity and power of social networking and blogging sites, Burns does not wish to condemn these tools. Rather she wants to provoke, especially for the younger generation, debate on the integrity of some of their uses.

She is concerned by the increasing need for public acceptance and validation in the social networking scene."

I don't know if I agree right away on the need for public acceptance and validation as 'increasing.'

What has increased is our the ease with which we can satisfy it.

And like most things (read: everything), we come to find that there's an optimal balance, a sort of moderation.

That is to say, it may be privacy/public validation today, but it will most certainly be something else tomorrow.

I wouldn't be too worried about it. (but then, I'm not too worried about most things...)

"Technology is scary! People will use all these status and twitter and facebook updates to find out when you're not home and come and steal all your DVDs! At least that was the ballyhoo last week when the site PleaseRobMe launched. Turns out, they were just reinventing the fear wheel. Andy Baio found an article from 1983 that warned consumers that burglars would know by your answering machine picking up that you weren't home, and one from 1977 that advised against posting funeral notices in the paper, lest robbers make off with the silver while you're burying grandpa. The more things change, the less they do."

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.