Information Co-Op

For the last couple of weeks it seems like there has been more news stories and more people talking about social networking in a different way than I have heard a lot of before. More and more people are starting to get really annoyed, I think, with the fact that we have lost all sense of privacy. Others, such as M. Cheb have taken a slightly more bleak look on the issue. So I figured I would give my two cents on the subject.

I don't really use facebook that much. I read it everyday, but I don't put much up there. I don't send many messages through it, I don't write that many comments, and I hardly ever leave a status update. But it is still part of my daily internet routine. The privacy issues aside, I think it is still a useful way to keep up with people. Still, I wonder if it is worth the risk. Someone that I barely know can be on my friend list and tag me in a compromising photo. That photo is then linked to my page, where anyone else on my friend list can see it. It's sort of like getting your photo on the front page every single time you do something stupid. And if you are me, you do stupid things on a regular enough basis for that to be a problem.

Anonymity is gone on the internet. Where once thousands of faceless dorks gathered and chatted and traded copywriten files, we now have a face. That face might be nothing more than an IP number, but it is still a face. And if people want to, they can find you, and they can destroy you. Granted that part about them destroying you is probably not going to happen, but you never can tell.

The thing is, it was something that probably was bound to happen, one way or another. Not just because the longer people have an internet connection the more information they are likely to put into the web, but because since the beginning people have been trying to find a way to humanize the other users on the internet. We couldn't exist in a digital world where everyone was able to pretend to be anyone. Eventually we had to learn to be ourselves, even while we surfed the web.

People don't like anonymous other people. Some part of our brain needs to know who we are dealing with. There are hours and hours that I could spend on why that is, or at least why I think that is, but I won't get into that now. Suffice to say that the more information we know about someone else the better we feel about that person. The problem comes in when there are things that you don't want other people to know about you.

It seems as though it would be so damn easy to enjoy the internet and not give out too much information. You just couldn't buy things online, and you'd have to set up a free email account that was only to be used when you had to sign up at some website. Avoid social networking altogether and you'd be okay. But then you find out that google is saving every internet search you've ever done (I tried to find a news article to link to that has something about that in there, but I used google search and for some reason nothing came up... but you can read about why you should be terrified of google) and you start to think that maybe, just maybe, privacy isn't an option anymore.

Of course we could all say fuck it. We could collectively say that we don't want everything we are doing to be tracked directly back to us and forgo the internet as much as possible. Or we could all, and this seems more likely, say that we are willing to give up online privacy in exchange for being able to have a computer that can access all the cat related videos we could ever possibly want.

I don't have any answers about any of this. I am a private person. But I have always been pretty paranoid about computer stuff. The fact that they really can and are tracking my searches doesn't surprise me. The fact that the police can create a fake profile and friend a friend of mine on facebook to spy on me doesn't surprise me. The fact that employers will search the webs for me doesn't surprise me.

I will probably have to abandon facebook because it is just too public at some point. And yet, a blog like this, I have no problem keeping up. And here I reveal much, much more about myself than I do on facebook. But at least I am the one who decides what is and is not going to be available from here. I wish people would go back to blogging. Blogging is basically an archaic ritual at this point, and only a few of us seem to remember what the point of it ever really was. Social networking sights are all about what you are doing right then, at that moment. They are all about the day to day life of an average person, being broadcast to the world for some strange reason. But blogs are not about what you are doing, they are about what you are thinking. And what people are thinking, even if it is on a day to day basis, has much more of a lasting impact than me telling all my friends that the sandwich I just ate was a little dry.