Facebook and “radical transparency” (a rant)
Sometimes, what a person says is magnified 1,000 times by who says it. This is one of those times. Danah is a smart person. This is worth reading.
What I find most fascinating in all of the discussions of transparency is the lack of transparency by Facebook itself. Sure, it would be nice to see executives use the same privacy settings that they determine are the acceptable defaults. And it would be nice to know what they’re saying when they’re meeting.
At it’s core this is a question of the changing tide of our cultural evolution. Jarvis once again nails it here:
* As I suggested here, it should study 16th century history about the origins of the public and private and understand that it is playing with bigger, more powerful and profound forces than even it knows. I just wrote in my next book that we are undergoing a similar shift in how society organizes itself with similar tools. Mark Zuckerberg says that he is enabling big change in society. I say examine that belief.
Yes, there is great, deep value in history. We’ve been through this transition before. We are innately social creatures. But that hard-wiring is difficult to scale cleanly. Moving from tribes of connections to villages to cities to distributed networks causes strain on the system. It’s true, we’re probably moving away from some of our plainer collective sense of privacy, but that doesn’t mean we individually walk away from our right to chose how we make that journey.
