The echo chamber of Twitter, the Blogosphere, and Facebook are reverberating with journalists and pundits going on at length, with intense fretting and dry-handwashing regarding the respect of privacy in social networks. I have two problems with the complaint over privacy in the 21st Century.
My first problem with privacy in the 21st Century is that privacy is the antithesis of socialization. The rage now is social networking, joining sites, finding others, connecting with people deep in your past and right around the corner. There is a kind of magic when you put a whole bunch of people in a social web, from the dissemination of news, information, to the most recent demonstration of altruism regarding the fellow on Metafilter who had people coming out of the woodwork to prevent a possible instance of human trafficking in New York City. We have tasted the candy of socialization and we like it, we have expanded into Facebook, Twitter, even WordPress in order to share ourselves with the outside world. Each of us consumes vast amounts of information now, instead of hunting for it at a Library we now wade through information online, and the places where we engage this social network are vast and varied, the bedroom, the bathroom, the boardroom. We have seen something shiny and the herd has put its head down and begun a social stampede. How does privacy last in this situation? It simply cannot! Privacy is DEAD. If you want to share, then how can you be private? “I want to be found, but I don’t want any of my information to be found.” This is utterly irrational.
The second problem with privacy in the 21st Century is this odd predilection for being utterly truthful to a fault. Lets say you would like to preserve some small shred of privacy online, why would you be utterly 100% honest to social networking sites? There is nothing absolutely binding you to only one email address, and you can elect to not include information you don’t want to provide! Even if you are pressed for information, what prevents anyone from stuffing the box with bogus details? What is my address? 1313 Mockingbird Lane. Obviously. Why are we so driven to be utterly honest online and then pitch a fit when that information is misused? I cannot understand why people who are driven to privacy haven’t yet constructed an alias, a completely fake persona, or even bogus contact information!
These two problems I have just bounce around in my head and I get more and more agitated and irritated when I see people whining at length about their precious privacy. Declaring that they will abandon Facebook because their privacy policies don’t fit in with their utopian ideals. It’s a free service, you aren’t held to be 100% truthful, so why all the bitching, moaning, and above all else impotent whining? If you haven’t poisoned the well when it comes to personal information in order to preserve your privacy, then your privacy is dead. Utterly DEAD. Get over it! Stop complaining about Facebook and Twitter and how you don’t want to share information. You are in a social stampede, all you can do really is stop running with the rest of us and allow yourself to be trampled.
It’s lonely being all by yourself. But at least you’ll have your precious privacy to keep you company.
