Living a transparent life.
Since I’ve been thinking about how Facebook is used by the “environmental movement” (a fuzzy term, I’ll concede), I’ve also been thinking a lot about how Facebook is used more generally. What am I doing with it? What are my friends doing with it? And what will our world look like as we become more and more accustomed to a sort of shared stream of consciousness?
I get frustrated with the argument that new social media are going to result in a population that has only superficial knowledge about issues of importance. (I happened to flip through The Dumbest Generation in a bookstore on Saturday; I can’t offer a review because I have not yet read it, but that did seem to be the author’s main point; in other words, it updates Amusing Ourselves to Death.) What we do on sites like Facebook is a choice; our choices are obviously shaped by the medium, but the medium makes it as easy to communicate book recommendations as it does who was at last night’s party. I don’t update my Facebook status terribly often, because microblogging and tweeting strike me as a bit more work than they’re worth, but I like being able to share a little capsule of my thoughts with a much wider group than the circle of friends and family that I see regularly, and I want those thought-capsules to be interesting.
I want that because that’s my life. I can – and do – choose to share what I’m thinking or reading or working on. Many of my friends also share their own ideas, goals, creative activities, political interests. Sometimes these are issues that have wider significance, and sometimes they’re not, but those little capsules can drive all kinds of interesting directions of thought for their readers.
However: what about the stories about teenagers who send each other naked photos and are arrested for possession of child pornography, or kids who upload pictures of their illicit drinking? As a society, I think we’re still adapting to the fact that our lives are increasingly transparent; the exponential increase in our ability to share information about ourselves and what we do has added new layers of richness to the ways that we interact, but it does reduce privacy as well. (I may blog under a pseudonym, but my Facebook page, after all, uses my real name.) But what do I want to keep private?
I wouldn’t want my phone number or my address to be widely available to people who don’t know me face to face. I wouldn’t want to post many details about friends or family because I’d be taking away their choice about how present they want to be online. But my thoughts and ideas? I like to be able to share them. I like to know that I’m presenting a face to the world that’s as congruent with how I see myself, and how I try to act, as I can. That means that I try to use Facebook to talk about the things that I think are interesting – good books, important environmental causes, and so forth – as well as to kick ass at Word Twist on a regular basis.
The internet is not going to disappear, no matter how many curmudgeonly people wish it and it’s consequences away. We can learn to adapt to them, though, by thinking about what we do online. Not that it needs to be serious: I love xkcd and cuteoverload and lolcats, and I love coming across bits of the internet that are creative, whimsical, and fun. I also love the fact that Science Blogs exists to create an ongoing conversation between scientists and non-scientists, and that social scientists and lawyers can blog about their professions and ideas, as well as about policy and politics. I love that I can take what I’ve learned and share it. If stupid content exists, then the answer is not to condemn the platform but to create new and better content of one’s own. Social media are part of that, because they’re such a powerful way to share that content.
