A vast psychological experiment
Recently Iain Forrester and I have been corresponding about, among other things, the shift in the type of social skills that young people today (including the two of us, kind of?) have. So I'm pretty interested in this fantastic article on "Kids, the Internet and the End of Privacy," especially as someone who has a Blogger account, a Livejournal and a Facebook page:
And after all, there is another way to look at this shift. Younger people, one could point out, are the only ones for whom it seems to have sunk in that the idea of a truly private life is already an illusion. Every street in New York has a surveillance camera. Each time you swipe your debit card at Duane Reade or use your MetroCard, that transaction is tracked. Your employer owns your e-mails. The NSA owns your phone calls. Your life is being lived in public whether you choose to acknowledge it or not.
My rule has always, always, always been to only put stuff on the internet if I don't care that everyone and their grandma knows about it. Hopefully that's the way you've been operating too.
And after all, there is another way to look at this shift. Younger people, one could point out, are the only ones for whom it seems to have sunk in that the idea of a truly private life is already an illusion. Every street in New York has a surveillance camera. Each time you swipe your debit card at Duane Reade or use your MetroCard, that transaction is tracked. Your employer owns your e-mails. The NSA owns your phone calls. Your life is being lived in public whether you choose to acknowledge it or not.
My rule has always, always, always been to only put stuff on the internet if I don't care that everyone and their grandma knows about it. Hopefully that's the way you've been operating too.
Thanks for that link. I've been thinking about this whole thing a lot lately, too, and this recent Slate article was sort of unsatisfying in really exploring all the facets of this phenomenon. I'm glad that the Nussbaum article tackled the idea of archiving your life, since that was what first appealed to me about maintaining a website, back when I had to produce a really shoddy homepage for college credit back in 1996: I thought it would be cool to be able to put up papers I wrote for class in an easily accessible format. Based on the kind of kid I was (in fourth grade I had a steno pad on which I kept profiles of all my classmates: birthdays, parents' and siblings' names, etc. -- sort of a proto-MySpace), I can only imagine what I would've been doing with the Internet back then.
Posted by
John C. |
1:03 PM
Wow, that protoMySpace thing is kind of awesome - not what I did as a kid, but I completely understand the impulse.
Of course, you should update your blog more often.
Posted by
Ian |
1:15 PM