privacy and openness
We’re all swimming in media:
End-users must be able to keep secrets
Mitch Ratcliffe[1]
William Gibson, “Father of Cyberpunk,” long known for his prescience, has put his finger on a fundamental truth about the world we live in today. His new book, Spook Country, contains a couple passages everyone concerned with media business models and the preservation of democracy should read and consider (along with the rest of the book, which is a pretty good yarn about the hidden currents of American paranoia).
When developing media offerings these days, we developers still think of an “audience.” These are people whose attention we own and attempt to control. At least, that was the habitual practice of newspaper, magazine and broadcast television network folks.
Gibson’s first observation, that we have moved from a time when mass media was something we observed to one when we are all part of mass media, that it has become the channels through which we interact with one another, is a spot-on analysis of the problem with trying to treat the “audience” as something outside the medium.
Because the old way of thinking about media persists, we have social networks that treat member data as commodity (a commodity is only valuable if it is managed by a company or trader, rather than having an inherent value—just ask any farmer who has seen his crop values manipulated by the middlemen). These sites ask members to publish their commodity identities in order to receive value in return, a condition that reduces one’s personal control of social exposure and interaction. We get “programs” that speak at us rather than media we participate in, because individual value is minuscule when the audience is merely being aggregated by a Web site or network.
During the fall of 2007, a flurry of blog postings about a bill of rights for social network users represented an expression of the frustration felt by people who understand that they dove into media years ago, but still are treated like they are merely watching from the edge of the pool by those who make “media properties.”
Initially proposed by Joseph Smarr, Marc Canter, Robert Scoble and Michael Arrington, the putative bill of rights calls for users of social networking to retain:
· Ownership of their own personal information, including:
o their own profile data,
o the list of people they are connected to,
the activity stream of content they create;
· Control of whether and how such personal information is shared with others; and
· Freedom to grant persistent access to their personal information to trusted external sites.
Considered against that call for greater control of personally identifiable information, the user agreements that memorialize the binary all-your-data-or-nothing approach to personal information on major social networks, seem like the kind of warnings posted at a public pool and that we need a lifeguard to caution us about eating before swimming.
We know how to swim. The “new” media that surrounds us is made by us. We can point a camera at anything, record anything, write and publish. In this world, anything can become a trend or media phenomenon, even if most of it won’t be a hit. Recognizing that the value is flowing everywhere, rather than only from the studios, producers and web site creators, unlocks the respect for the value of all participants in the network that bill of rights supporters are seeking.
Competent participants in a community or network don’t need a warning that they are about to give away every bit of information they have collected in social network profile in order to try a new application or find a new friend.
They need control in order to maximize the value of their contribution. That’s an ethically, politically and economically responsible perspective on this new media.
Gibson’s other insight explains how, once you get past treating people like lost children in the media stream, revenue and power is unlocked:
“Intelligence, Hollis, is advertising turned inside out.”
“Which means?” [Hollis asked].
“Secrets,” said Bigend, gesturing toward the screen, “are cool…. Secrets are the very root of cool.”
When one recognizes that all of us have secrets we use to negotiate with others, the value of giving users control of personal data becomes plain: If they can’t keep secrets, people don’t contribute to value creation. Instead, they are always scrambling to recoup the value they’ve lost.
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[1] Mitch Ratcliffe (www.ratcliffe.com) has covered technology, freedom and privacy issues for 20 years. He is cofounder of BuzzLogic Inc., a social influence analytics company, and, most recently, of Tetriad LLC, which is developing a social relationship system that preserves user control of information.