I've been thinking for a while about some of the challenges and opportunities of trying to recreate or create a system of social identity as we plunge headlong into online community and social networks in a faster and faster way. There has been a ton of good posts on this topic, most particularly by danah boyd, here, here, and here, and by Scoble here. All are worth reading. Increasingly, the focus is on privacy and identity implications. You can't miss the topic -- by the time an issue makes it to the cover of Parade Magazine, you can bet it has critical mass (though as an aside, it's hard to think about a way to trivialize an important topic more than the Parade article did. Miss America? Not so lewd Facebook photos? Blackmail? Please.) On the other hand, Brad Stone wrote over the weekend about the impact cyber snooping has had on relationships and the end of relationships in a way that is going to cause anyone reading the story to look at ways to nuke their hard drives. :)
Over on Slate, Michael Agger writes about social penguins and Emily Yoffe characterizes what it means to be a child worker in the online world, showing that the concept of social identity is as relevant to teens and pre-teens as it is to everyone else, and NPR reports on a Virgina program that mandates Internet safety training (in such a wild and over the top way I had a hard time I wasn't listening to a re-run of "reefer madness" -- check out this quote:
Gene Fishel, an assistant Virginia attorney general, came to the school auditorium to give a lesson about Internet safety — especially on social-networking sites such as MySpace, Facebook, and Xanga that teenagers often use to communicate, and criminals sometimes use to prowl for victims.
"MySpace is a breeding ground for these sexual predators," Fishel says, "and there are all sorts of cases happening now where predators have tracked down their victims off MySpace. And they abduct them, they will rape them, and do all sorts of things."
So amidst all the buzz and breathless froth, as well as the more thoughtful (aka danah) pieces, what are the conclusions?
First, to a large extent, Scott McNealy was right -- words I never thought I'd write. Mostly, privacy today is a thin shield that is easily pierced. We do have some control over the way we build up or strip down our own privacy shields, but anyone who has casually built a MySpace or Facebook page or set up a blog site has left digital footprints that are going to be very hard to get rid of. Even the NYT decision to expose more of their archives in a way that pops higher in search results fuels this. So the lesson: Say something online, be prepared to eat those words forever.
Second, it's going to get worse before it gets better. Photo tagging, YouTube videos, the ability for non-techie people to take video and stream online means that even people who have gone out of their way to stay offline or to carefully monitor what goes online can no be captured, uploaded, tagged and identified pretty easily. Dave Winer wrote about this last month. Plus, because of point 1 (things that go online stay online) as we figure things out our mistakes will be highly visible for a long time.
Third, the mainstream media will, by and large, continue to miss the point. It's really not about predators and blackmail, but the preservation and analysis of our virtual footprints and what they mean/don't mean about us. It's not the *single* event that is newsworthy, it's the combined set of events that we need to deal with.
Finally, the focus on starting by better tuning the ability to control what is exposed via social networking sites is the right place to start. There is no doubt that a huge amount of personal data is now being shared on Facebook and other sites, and the default settings are, to put it mildly, "open." If these aren't fixed (and I'm sort of skeptical they will be, since the road to revenue is via shared personal information for a site like Facebook), the not only will things get worse before they get better, but they might just not get better.
As I've noted earlier, we're in early days of figuring out identity. It is clear that at the personal level we still have a ways to go. From a communications standpoint, the landscape continues to evolve. The ability to understand an audience now is better than it has ever been, and we have the ability to think about focusing on smaller and smaller segments. Done well, and it's hard to do well, this means that the people who care most about what you want to say are the ones who will hear from you most directly. At the same time, the risk is higher too -- because an engaged community is, well, engaged. And engaged tends to mean passionate, and passionate means if you screw up they'll let you know.