Comments on: Facebook Timeline and a Culture of Transparency

By: AnthonyL

AnthonyL — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 05:58:59 +0000

Here is the Times article on the small but supposedly growing number of people who are dropping out of Facebook

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/14/technology/shunning-facebo…038;st=cse

By: AnthonyL

AnthonyL — Sun, 25 Dec 2011 18:11:19 +0000

We need intimacy and for people to give us acceptance, ideally 100%, but we need privacy to protect us from those that won’t, and one doesn’t have to be paranoid to realize that most won’t, whether they reveal it or not. Humans are complex and for them to give and get intimacy takes a lot of time, as the multiple layers of privacy are unsealed.

It is laughable how many people in the world don’t recognize this as an eternal verity, however many people got into the same home, inn or castle bed in the middle ages (amazing how people in the old days could ignore snoring! not to mention smells, coughing, presumably even sex).
Americans in particular are living in a fantasy world where they think developed personalities can live in (metaphorical) houses with all the windows and doors wide open to the street, and Facebook’s sweaty Mark Zuckerberg exploits this to the tune of $80 billion (is it now?) . Why are Americans so naive? My theory is that it is because the culture is so commercialised now and so media fed that the individual personality doesn’t get much chance to develop any more even in childhood, which is now subject to sugar commercials even for tots. Individual personality needs individual scope to develop.

Facebook and Twitter offer shallow illusions of personal connection which amount to nothing much compared with even brief personal contact in real life. Why is everyone so excited about it? It seems to be because that’s all they have these days. Virtual life is all a lot of kids growing up in the suburbs and cultural wastelands on the US hinterland have available to develop their individuality. Long live New York, where people do without cars, even, because accessibility to other people and real live events including even the sidewalk is available without owning one.

Yes people can do without privacy if all they are are shallow sketches of their potential selves, but it is a trend which hopefully will not survive very long, or humanity will not survive it in our current form. Even today as I say middle class people in the US typically seem to have to get to their fifties before they develop even a semblance of the individuality of expression that the rest of the world developed naturally by the age of five or seven until recently, though they are all becoming Americanized too, commercially speaking, it seems.

Anyone who disagrees with this may not have met the kind of people I am talking about, but you can see the difference in travel shows on TV. Compare Globetrekker with Rick Steve when they visit a country or city — Rick Steves will chattily and superficially line up all the consumption goods for you to taste with the culture as a consumption good too, whereas Globetrekker with feature some cute girl exploring the same material expanded to interaction with all the people in playful friendly and not too serious fashion where often the individual character they meet is as much a subject of attention as what they sell.

These are two worlds folks and one is Facebook and the other is the village in which we naturally live and my feeling is that the former will be conquered by the latter, because humans don’t change needs and desires in 100 years what they have built up over thousands. We all need to be as individual as we can be to be happy and that means a high level of protection from those who do not accept us completely, and we cant pretend that they are our friends just because stripped of all or virtually all social signals they work as “friends” on Facebook.

Nothing wrong with trusting other people to be as openminded and generous as we are but as they say, keep one hand on your wallet when among strangers.

By: James Felton Keith

James Felton Keith — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 16:03:54 +0000

Tihamer, you took the words right off of my keyboard. I agree totally :-) “Sure, we like privacy, but we *need* intimacy much more.”

By: Tihamer Toth-Fejel

Tihamer Toth-Fejel — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 13:15:03 +0000

James and Anthony have correctly pointed out that we change, and that sometimes we make mistakes.
However, privacy is not a basic human need as much as a practical strategy when dealing with strangers–and one that would not be as necessary if you always knew (as is usual off line) who was watching you. People have lived in small groups, without privacy, for hundreds of thousands of years. Sure, we like privacy, but we *need* intimacy much more.

By: AnthonyL

AnthonyL — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 18:28:36 +0000

Surely Facebook and its heavy users are flying in the face of an eternal truth about people, which is that information about yourself should not all be shared with everybody, including utter strangers, because you cannot trust their response to be understanding, or in line with your interests. Your relationships may change, too, turning a trusted friend into a disloyal one, because of some actual or imagined slight, which means that the pattern of your self censoring must change over time. etc etc The oversharing that Facebook encourages surely has the potential to turn sour later, for any number of reasons. But what is out there on the Web stays out there, so if there is a mistake in breaching your own privacy bubble it is rent permanently, and the embarrassment lasts forever. For these reasons I suggest that Facebook may reach a peak and then fade, in terms of use, at least - the numbers may increase but the usage will fall off. Tranparency sounds like a wonderful thing at first sight because it implies that we can be friends with everyone, but "friends" fall far short of this ideal in practice. Anyone with more than six or eight "friends" is fooling themselves, if they imagine there is actual friendship involved, in the traditional sense of the term. The pendulum is already swinging as the EU (and the US?) now are forcing Facebook to set its default to Opt Out rather than Opt In, and Zuckerberg rapidly took up the Google+ idea of confining info to different circles of acquaintances, rather than all or none. Privacy is just a standard human need and Facebook cannot change this however hard it tries and succeeds in the short run.