Open Online, But Guarded Off: New Social Norms Are Being Established Now

My good friend Dan McCarthy posted a good overview of social interaction and how social network analysis has become valuable as mass and easy communication has proliferated. He touches at the end on some interesting issues about privacy: as I discussed before, I suspect that what people consider to be private today will not be so in a few years because that is what has happened as mass communication has increased. For example, before the internet and social networking services like MySpace, you could say that a lot of information was "private." But now that it is in open space, it is no longer considered private. Privacy does not just mean social security and credit card numbers: it has to do with who we are, who we relate to and what we like to do. A social networking service profile reveals as much or as little of this information about ourselves as we wish. While a MySpace user's personal interests might have been considered "private" to 99.99% of the world before MySpace, it is now considered public to 100% of the world with access to the internet. What's fascinating to me is that a MySpace user may readily share this information with the faceless internet by posting it in their profile, but would be offended if a random stranger approached them on the street to ask what their interests are.  The difference is that walking up to a random person and asking personal questions as being inappropriate is something that has been a trained part of human interaction for many years.  But the internet is not so encumbered by long-standing human social norms and a computer screen is not considered as intrusive as a person.  There are many more privacy issues that spring from these questions, such as finding limits or considering location-aware social networks.  If you have some thoughts, please comment on this post or better yet send me an email so we can discuss.