Who else is tired of hearing the same old lecture?
Sometimes followed by, “Stop being afraid of the NSA, your own posting-addicted-self is whose to blame!”
What has the increase in technology done to us?
It’s made us more comfortable with ourselves and comfortable sharing ourselves with others. It’s made us more open and on the converse side more nosey, but none of this was on purpose. People seem to have a common trait in the fact that we like to understand ourselves and others as well. With the numerous and ever-increasing platforms that present themselves to us today, its almost natural to reduce our own privacy more so than we would in the past.
But having said all that, stop saying privacy is dead.
First of all, using the word “dead” to describe anything that is not organically deceased is so dramatic.
Second of all, Privacy is not dead. It’s just different than before.
The harm in believing privacy is “done for” is significant. If one wants to go along with the idea that privacy is no longer an option, it deteriorates the importance of the principle itself.
But let’s take the alternate and half-glass-full approach when it comes to discussing the word “privacy” and all the connotations it entails. Yes, privacy is changing. Some like to point out that just because we post more about our daily lives, doesn’t mean we actually know more about those lives. Wired’s Nathan Jurgenson takes an interesting perspective on the concept in general, “in reality, privacy operates not like a door that’s kept either open or closed but like a fan dance, a seductive game of reveal and conceal.” This ties in the fact there is a lot of information missed by our online filters, and someone’s humanity cannot truly be tracked online.
Privacy thrives in the “between-posts” realm, all the information left out of our posts. The amount of things we share online are no match for the countless of secrets we keep to ourselves or within our own circles of people we are comfortable with. Each new post we make on the internet in fact just brings about more questions. Like where were we? when? with who? how does that effect us? how does that effect others? etc…
Moreover, the sheer inundation of posts appearing on every online platform daily decreases how much information we are getting from each other. For instance the more posts your close Facebook friends make, the less posts of other people (who are irrelevant to your life) will be seen by you. Information on others is becoming prioritized with the more amount we are giving out, and strangely enough it limits our access to all that can be seen. This creates more opportunity for users to keep up with topics we find important and miss out of the things we don’t need or even want to know. All this extreme filtering makes your info more private and less out in the open. For not everyone is going to understand the messages you are sending through your posts…
but maybe we don’t want everyone to understand. Maybe that is how we can find privacy in our online worlds today.