Comment different notions of the public (Score 1) 362
Everyone keeps screaming that the Internet is a public space, but there's no discussion about how digital public is quite different than physical public. When people go online, they take their notions of context and public with them, not necessarily realizing that the differences in underlying architecture fundamentally impact them. People post something online with a notion of the context of space, time and people. I.e., on Usenet, they think about the location of their post in relationship to the other posts in the thread. They think about the types of people that might read their post. And they think about the acceptability of their post at the given time period. People perceive digital public to be like the physical equivalent: ephemeral not persistent. What you say offline to a group of people is rarely going to be taken out of context and then repeated to your boss. Online, space and time are collapsed by search engines, like Google. Thus, posts are taken out of the context in which they were created. In 1985, people had a notion of who the digital "public" was and it looked more like /.ers and academics than it did like the whole world. Commie scare, terrorist scare aside, people are not the same at 30 as they were at 15, but those childish posts are still connected with their identity.
Sure, tell people to use fake names. But why? If Microsoft gets its way, everyone will have one Passport to the web. And even if they don't collapse all of your pseudonyms, marketers or the government might. Hell, even academics are doing fun research on how to determine the individual language of each person.
No, i don't blame Google, but i do call all designers and programmers to get off their high horse and think about the common or marginalized person and start building systems that integrate safety nets for privacy and presentation of self. Otherwise, the Web is going to be awefully boring, full of people who are so outgoing that they don't care if everyone knows their shit or full of the professional resume version of anyone. Boring.
Sure, tell people to use fake names. But why? If Microsoft gets its way, everyone will have one Passport to the web. And even if they don't collapse all of your pseudonyms, marketers or the government might. Hell, even academics are doing fun research on how to determine the individual language of each person.
No, i don't blame Google, but i do call all designers and programmers to get off their high horse and think about the common or marginalized person and start building systems that integrate safety nets for privacy and presentation of self. Otherwise, the Web is going to be awefully boring, full of people who are so outgoing that they don't care if everyone knows their shit or full of the professional resume version of anyone. Boring.
