Notes On A Revolution

Jeff Jarvis has a fantastic summation of the debate surrounding online privacy and Facebook up at Buzz Machine. I’m going to quote liberally, but I really recommend you read the whole thing:

Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg seem to assume that once something is public, it’s public. They confused sharing with publishing. They conflate the public sphere with the making of a public. That is, when I blog something, I am publishing it to the world for anyone and everyone to see: the more the better, is the assumption. But when I put something on Facebook my assumption had been that I was sharing it just with the public I created and control there. That public is private.

This is an important distinction, the idea that we can create spaces among a group that still houses a private discussion. The notion, in hindsight, seems an obvious one, but I feel it’s something we’ve forgotten in the race towards the bright and shiny future.

…(In) Twitter, even though we are publishing to the world, we still have a measure of control; we decide whom to follow—that is, which publics to join.

…In Facebook, we get to create our publics. In Twitter, we decide which publics to join. But neither is the public sphere; neither entails publishing to everyone. Yet Facebook is pushing us more and more to publish to everyone and when it does, we lose control of our publics. That, I think, is the line it crossed.

This idea of curating our own “publics” is interesting - Business Insider likened it to programming a VCR 25 years ago; it’s a completely new behaviour being asked of us, no wonder we’re struggling with it.

Jeff aso makes reference to a group of academics from Montreal who created a project titled Making Publics. Their ideas are as follows:

…the public sphere—the counterweight to the state as heard through public discussion and opinion— (arguably) did not emerge until the 19th century. …prior to the Renaissance and the 16th century, “public” (generally) referred to people with public standing in the social hierarchy—the elite—rather than to all of us. But then the Making Public team saw that during the 16th and 17th centuries, the printing press, theater, art—that is, the means to publish and present—as well as markets enabled people to create and join their own publics.

So the notion or our own publics is not a new one, but we’ve likely had to deal with no more than half a dozen in life before now; a work public, a home public, a family public, a church or community group public. Contrasted now with the variety of publics created based on how you choose to alter privacy settings depending on who you’re friends with on Facebook, the iterations are almost limitless.

I don’t believe Facebook has gone evil—or gone rogue, as Wired insists. The problem for Facebook is more likely that it never defined evil—as in “don’t be evil.” Google is aware of its line, which is about losing value if it loses trust. Facebook seems almost unaware of its line and perhaps that’s because its is harder to find. I suggest they study 16th century history and the origins of the public as they reinvent the public.

Facebook is breaking this ground for a host of services still to come. That doesn’t make them right or wrong, but I think notions of quitting Facebook ignore a basic fact.

Sooner or later, someone is going to need to sort this shit out.

(See a post form earlier this week looking at the changes to Facebook’s privacy policy over time.)