Facebook: calling the identity bluff.
The interesting thing about the current facebook backlash has nothing to do with privacy, and everything to do with identity. The Zuckerberg quote relating the desire to maintain two (or more) distinct personas to a lack of integrity got me thinking about this.
Ignoring, for a moment, the very real risks caused by facebook moving from a system with user control and privacy baked in, to the current, open by default system; Zuckerberg almost, sort of, has a poorly expressed point.
The people who are responding indignantly to their social actions being public by default, are often the same people who have been arguing passionately that such things shouldn’t need to be hidden. If everyone makes decisions or takes actions that aren’t reflective of their best judgement, why are we all living in the online equivalent of a small town - knowing everyone’s dirty laundry, but being afraid to discuss it?
Even if it’s being done specifically because a unified persona is more useful as both a demographic data point, and as a target for ads, facebook is one of the few companies that can actually call the massive bluff attached to this argument.
With 400 million users, clinging to old social norms regarding public shaming and shunning for common actions is an issue of mutually assured destruction.
I’m far from sure how it will play out, but I think it’s slightly hypocritical to intimate facebook is declaring war on privacy. Facebook, whether or not it is a business decision, is potenially forcing the social shift the internet has been begging for since social media became a buzzword.
The way we deal with watching and judging a person might actually have to change, without the half-joke of waiting for the boomers to die actually coming to pass.
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