What do we want seen?

I thought it would be interesting to look more closely at how I view my privacy, especially in light of the internet. In the article by Sherry Turkle, this lack of a sense of privacy is very clearly contrasted with the mail. This is interesting because I think that this example doesn’t really have the desired effect because most of the people who are unconcerned with the lack of privacy have probably never really received personal mail.

What I found to be most interesting is the thought of vulnerability that is associated with a lack of privacy; it is reminiscent of an intrusion and as a violation. I think this is what makes it less of an intrusion t be monitored over the internet, because everyone voluntarily puts their information on the internet. You are not one of a hundred people whose information is stolen; you are assimilated into a mass of other people who have done the same thing. I think that is why we are so willing; it is a type of social peer pressure to not care about what personal information is on the internet.

Having said this, I think that we now have a new idea of what is personal and what is private. Your address and your telephone number are not personal; they are almost public property now. What seems to make the list for something that is personal is your thoughts. Take Facebook for example; Facebook is an outlet for an individual to express their thoughts, and while it may not be totally “private” the information we upload there is only visible to those we want to see it.  Or, we are hyper aware of who could see it. I think this is an interesting intersection to look at because while we are free to say whatever we want, there is definitely an element of self censorship at work here. This is probably in part because we are open to criticism publicly on facebook, and so we are guarded. No one is going to use your purchases of candy or shampoo at Wal-Mart against you, but they could use your comment about the girl next to you in class against you.

I think that this brings to light a very interesting question; does the value we put on our external reputation and image more important than our internal one? Perhaps this is the whole point of facebook and such social networking systems. They are designed to cater to our desires, and it seems that instead of being what we want to be, we simply project what we want to be. Your social standing is now more in your control because you control what people see and what they don’t. I think there is a lot we could divulge if we held technology up to ourselves as a mirror and really got to the bottom of what we want, and what it is giving us.