carolstimmel.net

Hunker down to read the slightly dated A Privacy Paradox: Social Networking in the United States; another First Monday publication. Author Susan Barnes discusses private vs. public space and social networking privacy issues.

I first encountered the Privacy Paradox while doing consulting work with eBay. eBay was facing the “walled-garden” challenge; wherein users would transfer monies, sometimes substantial amounts, to complete strangers in remote countries like Absurdistan, being defrauded in the process. What was functioning, was the belief that since everyone was an eBay member, that they were somehow a vetted and trustworthy participant in the transaction.

Barnes observes a similar function within social networks where members, teenagers in this case, give away extensive personally identifiable information in order to participate in electronically-mediated relationship building.  The Internet is described - as it has been from other sources - as a panopticon; an architectural construct wherein prisoners can be observed and thus behavior is influenced by the very notion that it may be seen.  And therein lies the rub of social networking sites: A certain amount of personally-identifying information must be provided to engage, yet participants are unaware of the panopticon they are trapped in and believe that as long as their parents aren’t reading their profiles, they are private.

Given the disparity in frontal lobe growth between an adult and a teenager, I can fully believe this to be a realistic analysis.  However, with the meteoric growth of social networks, especially niche networks (i.e. Recovering Alcoholics, Dog Lovers, …) and the willingness of the over 21-40-crowd to dabble, I believe the opposite phenomenon is occurring.  Nano-blogging sites, such as Twitter, anecdotally show one of two blogging variants - 1) isn’t my life exciting! and 2) I just did x and I feel y about it (yawn) and the fear of lost-privacy has been completely broken down.  Simply by pounding out 140-characters and hitting send, our naturally ego-centric personalities receive their much-needed balm - no matter what the cost.

Such systems chew away at our beliefs that individual autonomy is of significant meaning anymore.  After all, isn’t privacy about individual autonomy and the maintenance of personal integrity?  Perhaps the Privacy Paradox isn’t such a paradox anymore.  When Jane blogs about a weekend of drinking and debauchery when she’s babysitting Johnny, well, then Internet content becomes shit on a shingle.  The abuse of personally identifiable information remains a significant concern, but please remember, the check’s in the mail.

Lisa Reichelt at Disambiguity calls Twitter level detail where users pump their “real life” noise into the aether “ambient intimacy”. Reichelt says, It makes us feel closer to people we care for but in whose lives we’re not able to participate as closely as we’d like.

I bemoan the fact that people primarily now use twitter for social networking, lazy-blogging events they are attending, painfully detailed demarcations in their day, or incredibly obvious pumps to their ego. What bums me out is that people may tell the factual truth, but it’s always seems to be for an end-purpose. The medium would be so much more interesting if I could twitter, “wow, the drugs aren’t working today” without worrying about Twitter-tremors or seismic waves registering in my wetware life. The medium is so discredited in my mind that I find the Twitter Suicide Note refreshing.

Can I go as far as saying that Twitter and other activity-stream players, like Jaiku (now a part of Google) a bit boring? In some sense, yes, in another sense, it is endlessly fascinating to see how people work to control their online presence. Unlike Reichert who believes we draw closer to our twittermates through this endless streaming, my assertion is that intimacy is about love and friendship. Sharing your inner self crosses a heretofore silent boundary and I’ve observed this rarely crossed. And when one does, you might expect the police to show up at your door and lock you up in Bellview.

By the way, you can follow my lies on Twitter.

While publishing my online persona through Facebook, MySpace, Plazes or on this blog is now insanely easy through available technology that the question is no longer can I, but how out of control can this experience get?

First off, keeping track of all these sources is a blown deal for me, right from the beginning. I won’t do it, and I can’t do it. Spending my every waking moment traveling from source to source gets cumbersome, even with the beckoning to update my status.

The only true status I reliably provide is through my twitter stream because I can do it from my desktop and from my phone. And even that is not a guarantee. Using my Flock browser on with the people bar running, I can also update my facebook status (I haven’t yet begun to use SMS to update facebook yet). However, being an employee and fan of Me.dium, I tend to run the Me.dium sidebar exclusively prohibiting the use of the use of the people bar.

So, I chose to use my blog to publish all my sources, but how can I keep my sources easily updated? Obviously, all these social networks arent’ helping to keep me organized in anyway, but tend to provide an incidental look at my online activities. I want access to an aggregator that not only allows me to see my activity stream (actually, I already know what I have been doing), but allow me to interact with the items in the stream.

So far, I have tried SocialURL, Profilactic and Spokeo and am left feeling like these products are glorified RSS publishers with slick Web 2.0 interfaces. In fact, the closest I’ve come to what I’m looking for is Jared Polis’ Fuser, like Me.dium, another Boulder, Colorado startup.

It has taken awhile for me to be able to even test Fuser, because it has been so buggy. Yes, it’s in it’s Beta phase, but I couldn’t even use it. In fact, it’s still fairly buggy now and the interface is wanting, but I can see that they are moving in a unique direction from a simple aggregator by allowing you to access and interact with your network (only Facebook and MySpace right now) data complete with profile data. I’ll keep trying to use it, and hopefully there is velocity behind their development team, because my curiousity is piqued.

Blogging has always been an experimental exercise for me and on the former instantiation of carolstimmel.net, there was lots of commentary about online plays in the presence space.

A life stream or presence stream allows you to publish your online identity and activities for public consumption. Social network users frequently participate in many sources of stream activity and in turn, those sources through APIs or RSS feeds allow a user to subscribe to their own or someone else’s view of those activities.

This blog is now turning its attention towards sites and services that provide presence data and reviews and related commentary.