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.

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?

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:

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.

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 …

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!)

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.

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.