A Few Thoughts about Privacy and Social Media: A Response to Pete Cashmore

I have been on a tumbling hiatus lately. For the three of you that read my tumble log with regularity, I extend my deepest, most heartfelt apologies. My hiatus is, however, a little justified because I, along with 15 of my friends, have been working on an online journal about people and their social media practices. The project, which has the working title “We Are Local,” is a giant tumble log of people talking about a given topic and how they use social media to gather information about that topic.

We Are Local is less about the topics people are writing about and more about trying to create interesting, innovative ways of documenting individual social media practices. Our goal is to understand larger trends in social media adoption and engagement by thoroughly documenting our own individual practices. The information available is the information that people willingly made the decision to disclose and distribute. As we get closer to launching, I’ll be sure to discuss the project at greater length. But anyway, back to the matter at hand: the relationship between privacy, public life, and social media.

Pete Cashmore, the founder of Mashable, a respected blog about updates in the world of social media, wrote an interesting but troubling piece for CNN entitled “Privacy is Dead, and Social Media Hold Smoking Gun.” Here’s the skinny on the piece: social media is continuing to evolve and continuing to produce easy, innovative approaches to establishing and re-establishing ties between people. Lack of participation in the social media space is more than just attempts at maintaining privacy; it’s erasure and is, as far as Cashmore is concerned, a kind of social death. Privacy can materialize into missed job opportunities, missed friendships with colleagues, and losses in other avenues of personal gain.

I respect Cashmore but honestly, this piece struck me as an overly naive, uncritical celebration of social media and individual transparency. Cashmore wants people to, I think, get online, create and perform social selves that disclose intimate details of their life. Details become a kind of currency exchanged between participants in this space and disclosure means potentially higher status in online and offline lives. While this is ostensibly the case, an individual’s privacy should not come at the exclusion of participation.

To be clear, a person should be able to disclose whatever details they choose about themselves via social media to whatever degree they choose without fear of erasure if they don’t fully disclose. In Cashmore’s model, full participation in social media will become crucial to preventing social erasure. Cashmore assumes this indeed will become reality but doesn’t seem to think it’s a problem. He has a kind of “this is it, so deal” attitude about the whole thing. Although I think there is some truth to this possiblity, I do think the potential exclusion of an individual’s privacy in the name of social media participation is a huge problem. HUGE.

Privacy is not dead. Privates and publics are not static, predefined categories: definitions of privacy and public space are completely contingent on another for existence and meaning. I can understand one if I can contrast it against the other (e.g., home versus the office). More importantly, the act of being alive in the world means having to negotiate multiple public and private spaces. It’s a complex feat that some of us manage with deft and grace. Some of us fail royally and pray that Google has not cached and indexed our failures.

What we need and must work to create is a balance between our private and public lives that remains, generally speaking, within our individual control, outside the reach of brand marketers or HR. Perhaps changes in notions of intellectual property, individual discretion or more robust ethics of data mining and online behavioral tracking will help create this balance. In the interim,  we should be able to go work without fear that our desire not to befriend our bosses on Facebook is going to hurt our chances of advancement. We need to create models where individual desires to keep details and experiences off limits to the majority should not just exist; they should be protected. As the Orwellian aspects of social media continue to grow and expand, privacy is a right worth fighting for. Without privacy, public disclosure loses its meaning and ceases to be truly compelling.