We recently watched the documentary “We live in Public“. It’s disturbing, prophetic, confronting and thought-provoking. While it’s an extreme version of the lives almost all of us live, the elements many of us play with each day inch closer to “living in public”.
The ubiquitousness of social networking, recording devices and ease of worldwide distribution in merely a few years has changed what each generation understands as being public versus private.
I’m all for engaging with social media and I love using Facebook and Twitter, reading blogs, video conferencing and using my iphone. But at the same time, I found myself reflecting on some of the comments made in the documentary – made years before the advent of these things:
- How people find their self-worth based in the number of comments, or reads, or likes or numbers of “friends”.
- How people are crying out to be heard and to get their 15 minutes of fame every day.
- How we think we’re getting community online but we often feel more alone.
- How we trade privacy for connections with people.
- How we forget how public things are when we’re immersed in a culture with no privacy.
When I found myself in the emergency room of hospital ten days ago, I sent txt messages to close friends and family – but didn’t tweet about it. I wanted to know that the people I love deeply knew first. Years ago, news would take quite a while to circulate in a circle of friends and acquaintances but now it can be done in an instant – globally.
I’ve seen numerous times people forget this on Facebook or Twitter and stress about making sure someone knew before they were told by someone else – rather than directly. From the outside, it may seem silly that someone should “forget” that anyone can read it, but once immersed in social media it is hard to remember what private means.
Another result of watching the documentary: I recently did a cull of people on Facebook – names I didn’t recognise, or people I had never exchanged communication with on there. There were surprisingly lots of them and it actually felt good to do a spring-clean.
I also was reflecting on my sister’s comments about how she always left a comment if she looked through a set of someone’s photos on Facebook – she felt a bit stalkerish without doing so. That’s quite a nice thing to do and it really doesn’t take time – let someone know you’ve noticed, you’re interested, you’re there. We read so many blog posts and then skip on to the next interesting thing without stopping to engage – because it’s not required. We’ve swap ease of access for probably less engagement. Yes we don’t have to sit through boring slideshows of other people’s trips and can pick and choose what we want to see, but we’ve lost all those real conversations, the context around the photos – the laughing together, the eating, the swapping of stories. They can be gained online, but it’s more work than we’re used to.
PS, I’m fine!
your thoughts
Ben Tremblay
You’re touching on something fundamental here. I’ve been drillling down through it for, well, over 3 decades. I noticed another branch of it when I got involved in something personally important that was political. It seemed to me that people who “agreed” actually sympathized as little as people who disagreed dramatically … maybe less!
I’ll give you a lateral as e.g.: “The Rage Is Not About Health Care” from NYTimes. Folk getting all he’t up about health-care but it’s not really health-care that’s got their *** in a twist.
See what I’m getting at? Folk shouting about X but it’s not X they’re worked up about. And so, folk get all tweetie about Y … but Y actually doesn’t matter to them, not really. “Proxy” is one way of explaining it.
I say it’s more about image maintenance.
When Iet go wealth I found that I was spending time with people who were more … real? I’d like to say authentic, but that’s kinda rare.
So folk are chasing “attention”. Let’s say they get it … what did they actually get? What do they have that they didn’t have before?
Applause echo, maybe … you know, the whole “Daily Me” thing. (One of the papers on social networks I read a long, long time ago showed an interesting trend line: as number of connections increased there was a dramatic increase in variety of connection. But when the number was almost unlimited? The authors called it “Balkanization” … very, very homogenous.)
I’m tempering my words here. My tweet-stream is full of #glib and #facile and #matrix and #borg.
Rachel
Thanks for your thoughts Ben! Fame/attention was probably the ultimate ruin of Josh Harris, the subject of the documentary. It’s addictive but ultimately hollow. When he was getting thousands of people watching his every move in his apartment, he was on a high. When the numbers started to drop, he got depressed and his girlfriend didn’t want to be someone she wasn’t by acting up for the cameras. He said he got bored, and I think that’s what happens eventually. Attention gets boring.
Pete
A very interesting post – and it sounds like a very interesting documentary too. The loss of privacy worries me a lot with social networking, I have vocally criticised the new changes to facebook because there is just no way of keeping private any more. I had my friends list culled a lot but as soon as they changed it I started getting many more requests; some from old school friends but many from other random people who I don’t know or who are friends of friends. I’ve ignored a lot but sometimes it’s just not so easy – you know a person enough not to want to cause offence, but really might not want them there. It seems that companies like facebook want to encourage the social networking as popularity contest ideal instead of having it as something genuinely useful for friendships and communication. The emphasis seems solely on quantity and not on quality.
This in turn leads us to the position where we can feel obliged to say things or talk about some things just because we don’t want a person to take offence or think less of us. It becomes a case of inter-acquaintance (I hesistate to say friend as no one has *that* many friends!) politics.
There needs to be a model of social networking where people can keep absolute control of privacy but it doesn’t seem any of the big players will allow that because their business growth depends on increasing traffic not providing better tools.
Rachel
Pete: I don’t think most people realise how accessible their photos are when they upload them to Facebook.
Totally agree on the being careful not to cause offense – I have refrained from posting some things because I know it’d probably cause an argument (politics mainly)! But then again, there’s times just like that when we keep our mouths closed with close friends/family.
/Karen/
Hey Rachel!
I’ve been thinking about this post ever since I read it, so thank you for raising the issues! I have a few thoughts but I am not sure how coherent they will be, so apologies in advance!
1. Regarding my online activities, it seems to me that a lot of people think that what I share is oversharing. But I do think about it, and I’m careful about not sharing certain things. I know some people would say that it’s not good to share your interests and proclivities online because then advertisers can target you, but that seems like being overly cautious to me. However, I _am_ careful about not sharing my location/home address, etc.
I also wonder if my comfort level regarding sharing is somewhat higher than most people’s. I know that I’ve been partly influenced by online culture as many people are quite open, but part of it is wanting to be known for who I am–that sort of revelation of self that you may not get unless you ask for it. (Maybe it’s just that most people haven’t asked for it …) I also feel I am prepared to weather the consequences, whatever they may be (and, so far, they haven’t been negative. I suppose if I were more well known it would be more of a problem …)
Also, I’m deliberate in the way I craft the narrative about my life. (I also like to think I’m amusing but I’m probably self-deceived!)
/Karen/
3. A related point: several people have viewed some of my online activities as being attention-seeking. I know that I cannot always claim pure motives in this regard, but often when I do Tweet/blog/Facebook, wanting attention is the farthest thing from my mind. Or I am aware that I crave it–in which case, I am training myself to acknowledge the need, shut down the computer and do something else that might meet the need more appropriately.
Regarding the people who think this way, part of it is their unfamiliarity with new technology and its uses. After all, updating your status on Twitter 20 times a day is not necessarily attention-seeking; it is simply microblogging–putting content out there and taking advantage of social networking tools. Part of it is also the ‘noise’ factor, which can be rather subjective: if, on social networking, you are only friends with 20 people and 19 of them don’t tend to use it that much but one does, it can seem like that one person is attention-seeking because his/her updates are clogging up your feed. But that particular person may be friends with 100 people who are all avid social networkers, so his/her updates don’t seem that frequent by comparison.
4. Regarding what Pete said about Facebook:
It seems to me that technology hasn’t caught up with the nuances of human relationships and the different faces we present to the world (i.e. we are different when we are with family than to when we are with close friends than to when we are at work, etc.) I wonder if it ever will …
Rachel Cunliffe
Thanks Karen for your thoughts.
I think that the documentary would see that people become more and more comfortable with online culture (and I would say in younger generations) that the understanding of why you might not want to share everything and anything may be lost. I don’t mind if the ads I see online are more targeted at me either – beats seeing spam about poker or viagra!
I wonder if it’s also a case of it everyone at a party is talking loudly, then you have to work just that little bit harder to be heard over all the noise?
/Karen/
Yes, very true! I remember reading somewhere that because of the nature of the technology, you must speak up and keep on speaking up, otherwise people forget about you.
Simon Young
Hi Rachel,
First, glad you’re ok!
Second, We Live In Public was an amazing experience. It made me reflect on how easy it is for us humans to pursue the worthless while trashing the most precious things in life.
It also highlighted that in this time, perhaps more than ever, we need to understand what it is to be a citizen. What it means to be part of a community, not just a network.
Recommended reading: A Brief History of the Future. It paints two potential outcomes: technological servitude with uber-individuality but no human connection, or a world run by “transhumans” – people who have learnt to prioritise the needs of us all over our immediate wants and needs. Challenging stuff.