Privacy is a very strange thing, and while one generation is increasingly concerned about it being taken away, another seems to be doing it's best to make the big brother state a reality. Many of us should have seen this coming a mile off. All you need do is look at the fixation today with celebrity culture and knowing absolutely everything about their lives and the idea of joe public wanting the same seems like a natural evolution. Suddenly the idea of having someone write about the ins and outs of your life has become a kind of status symbol, but what if nobody wants to write about you? Then write it yourself.The phrase of choice at the moment is 'declarative living', and it is taking place on the web in many forms. Blogging is of course one, but through sites such as facebook and twitter it is possible to find out what any of your friends are up to at any given time. So what has happened to privacy? At the moment the major distinction is that you only post what you want people to see, but there are already extreme examples to be found. Take a look for example at 'The Nerdman Show'. While this might seem a little bizarre to most people (me included), here is someone literally broadcasting their life online. So where is the next evolution of this?
The ability to give status updates about your life is becoming more and more pervasive. From being able to blog from your mobile, to your online status in MSN, technology is making declarative living a reality. The next step of course would be for this to be automatic. But change who is viewing your life from something as inoffensive as 'friend', to something like 'government' and suddenly the altitudes change. While we worry about what records the government might be keeping about our lives we suddenly find out that it is us who are making it easy for them to maintain them. But again, maybe this is a generation thing. Maybe the rights to privacy are not as important an issue for Generation Y, and soon the idea of the state knowing these details and acting upon them will become the norm. But for those of us who have taken to this new trend (myself included), don't be surprised if that information gets used for something you hadn't intended it too. Because you only have the source of the information to blame. And that's you.
2 comments:
Interesting thoughts Matt. I'd take some issue with the idea that declarative living is driven by celebrity culture. For me, sharing information with the world about my every movement (Last.fm, Plazes, Twitter, etc) is more about finding the unexpected benefits in discovering shared links and coincidences (oh, I didn't know Bob was going to be in Paris at the same time as me.. we should meet up).
In any large system you get interesting emergent behaviour. Eventually, finding some of that value can be automated; I love the idea of benevolent agents keeping an eye on me to make my life easier by making suggestions, doing my shopping, booking my tickets, or whatever. Perhaps that's where the eventual value lies.
Of course, none of this changes the tension in the loss of privacy. A potentially tricky balance. So far, I'm finding the value in sharing more data about myself outweighs the lost privacy, mainly because all of this is pleasingly fine grained and opt-in, rather than literally tracking my every movement without my consent.
I think you are largely right that there are lots of people who are using the information to very good effect, I think it gets extremeley interesting though when the data could be used for a different purpose. For example through facebook I'm finding that my work and social lives are becoming increasingly smashed together and you're now only two clicks away from work colleagues being able to see my drunken party photos, which is largely outside of my control. It seems like maybe there is scope for declarations to be grouped by task as well as people, but I'm going to need to think abit more before I can decide how that would work!
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